Now we know the answer, but Finkelstein’s skilful use of dramatic irony helps us see that at the time, smart people could conclude that the Netherlands was the better place to be and so stayed put – with disastrous consequences. Finkelstein not only shares the family's experiences of persecution at the hands of the Nazis and the Soviet Union, he also manages to provide enormous context for the events that shaped either the survival or murder of family members. When the merger with the Liberal Party was proposed, Finkelstein was among the leading opponents and refused to join the merged party, instead following Owen into the 'continuing' SDP. Luckily their son, Daniel Finkelstein, a Times columnist and member of the House of Lords, has put pen to paper for them. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site.

His grandfather Dolu was arrested and disappeared, while his father and grandmother were sent to Siberia, working as slave labourers on a collective farm. There are not too many whys either in Daniel Finkelstein’s powerful and beautifully written new book, which tells the story of how his Jewish parents lived through the Holocaust, as European civilisation was ripped apart by nazism and communism in the 1930s and 40s. There’s an echo here of Clive James’s haunting ode to Viennese cafe culture in Cultural Amnesia: “For the Jewish intelligentsia, cultivated to the fingertips, it was very hard to grasp the intensity of the irrationality they were dealing with – the irrationality that was counting the hours until it could deal with them.We know that’s a good way of surviving, so we try to reciprocate other people’s favours and hope they reciprocate ours.

Conservatism is different around the world because what it's trying to preserve, the 'essence of a nation,' inevitably varies by country, says British journalist and politician Daniel Finkelstein. Nobody who understands evolutionary psychology should go from that to believing, for example, that because women and men are different that either are superior or inferior to the others. He has no time for those who sneer at the suburbs, or try to escape to supposedly more exciting urban grit. Meanwhile, the Tory radicals were out on the street protesting about the failure to improve factory conditions, and these supporters of what later became Lord Shaftesbury’s reforms and the supporters of the Great Reform Bill had a stand-up fight in the streets of Leeds.

Danny Finkelstein has written an elegant, moving account of the history of one family, and in doing so shines light on the history of the 20th century. There have been periods when principle guided the Times — for instance when the great war correspondent W. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.