Words From Vaish

Aurore Graham Hurley     Head Of Zeus 2017                                                 409 Pages    The second world war has proved a generous mine for authors of war stories; former TV documentary film maker Graham Hurley, previously noted for his Winter and Faraday mysteries , is the latest to join their ranks. Aurore (French for “first light”) is the second of his “Wars Within” trilogy. The war was fought on many different parallel fronts ; Aurore details what happens when two of these intersect. Twenty-seven-year-old RAF Flight Sergeant Billy Angell, a wireless operator on Lancaster bombers, seemingly has nothing in common with middle-aged French sophisticate Helene Lafosse in her chateau in the Touraine.- but their disparate worlds are about to collide. Plucked from RAF Bomber Command by MI6 after surviving the completion of his 30 th mission, Flight Sergeant Angell, a former actor and Quaker conscientious objector, is sent to occupied France with t

“God is always on the side of the big battalions.”         -  Anon Why, oh why, didn’t Allah read the script his faithful so thoughtfully prepared for him? This used to be a common occurrence on the North-West frontier of the British Raj, when itinerant preachers periodically used to arouse the Pashtun tribes to drive the infidel Angrezi to the sea. All this was supposed to be at Allah’s direction. These crusades were supposed to cleanse the land of the unbelievers’ influence and establish a dar-ul-Islam in its place. What then always happened was that the English unbelievers, forewarned by their excellent intelligence network, invariably rallied and successfully routed the invading tribal levies – usually inflicting heavy casualties on them in the process. How the Mullahs of those days explained away these periodic failures would have been very interesting to hear. Allah certainly wasn’t on-script in these many disasters, especially during the great Pathan ri

The Forgotten Children Fairbridge Farm School And It’s Betrayal Of Britain’s Child Migrants David Hill Allen & Unwin 2017                                                                                  338 Pages “You can never really entrust your children to anyone else” - Anon Author David Hill’s single mother did, but realizing her error, was luckily on hand to rescue him and two siblings from a very Dickensian institution in - of all places - 20 th century Australia.  Mr Bumble the Beadle, Wackford Squeers and other such fictional 19 th century child-abusing Victorian ogres would have felt right at home at the Fairbridge Farm School, Molong, established in 1938. This now happily defunct Gulag of child slaves was no less a hellhole than the chilly soot-encrusted workhouse of Oliver Twist in the London slums. The road to hell is paved with good(?) intentions... The Fairbridge scheme was borne out of the seemingly laudable desire of Kingsle

Hurt Sentiments   “Hurting Our Sentiments...”  The above phrase currently provides both excuse and justification for certain special interests to indulge in wanton rioting and vandalism. What India needs is tough legislation, backed by even tougher police action and legal penalties to hurt the ability of such groups to hurt public order – and property. Playboy once released a satirical video depicting a caricatured Mahatma Gandhi carousing with scantily-clad women. This televisual trash may have “hurt the sentiments” of the Indian diaspora but they had the good sense to deplore it in a civilized way. The tough attitude of the Chicago Police Department and the American Courts towards overly violent public demonstrations of moral outrage might have also had something to do with such model restraint.  A Rajput caste grouping has recently threatened to “burn the nation” if the controversial film Padmavat about a fictional 13th - 14th century legendary  queen of Chittor was r

VANISHING ACT There was a gadget in the old Star Trek TV show that de-materialized people and then re-materialized them thousands or millions of miles away. This sounds like a fun way to travel; no waiting in queues for visas, no expensive airline bookings, no rotten flights for the air sick or those afraid of flying... But it wasn’t really much fun when it first happened. That was when the “gift” first manifested itself. “Gift” did I say? Curse, more like.  I didn’t notice at first, going to University College Cork and adjusting to hostel life for the first time has a way of distracting you. Attention-grabbing peers, the academic course load, etc. etc. also didn’t help. Anyway, I had a history of losing stuff since I was a wee colleen with flame-red hair in pigtails. So I chalked up the mysterious vanishing of sundry study materials and some of my personal kit to a natural propensity of mislaying my possessions and didn’t give it much further thought. Big mista

Bad Dad David Walliams Illustrated by Tony Ross HarperCollins Children’s Books 2017                                                   422 Pages           There once used to be a preachy school of sententious Victorian children’s fiction wherein the bad boy was eaten up by a lion for his wickedness; whilst the good boy came into deserved fame and fortune, before being drawn up to heaven by God and his angels. Thankfully, kid lit had come a long way since those awful days. Bad Dad is gleefully anarchic, but no less moralistic, plentiful comic havoc notwithstanding. The “Bad Dad” of the title isn’t really bad; he’s a racing champion crippled after a horrific crash and blackmailed into a life of crime thereafter as the getaway car driver for a cartoon trio of villains.  These three, led by the dwarfish, comically sinister Mr Big, are easily the funniest part of the book. The interplay between his two bickering minions “Fingers” and “Thumbs” constitutes a comedy

The Honest Spy Andreas Kollender Translated by Steve Anderson Amazon Crossing 2017                                                     353 Pages Not all Germans were Nazis... Like the Schindler famous for a celebrated list that salvaged a cross-section of a doomed race during the dark years of the holocaust, Fritz Kolbe detested Nazi ideology and despised party hacks, besides hating Germany’s Fuhrer with a passion that ran dark and deep.  Unlike the playboy-profiteer Schindler, the more principled Herr Kolbe was an insider, being a senior civil servant in the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin. After a promising early career with pre-war diplomatic postings in Spain and South Africa, his continuing refusal to join the Nazi Party saw him ignominiously recalled to Germany and given the lowly job of stamping visas and passports. Eventually entrusted with burning high-level confidential documents, he copied key extracts of these with a view to offering thi