Criticizing the Critics (3) – AA Gill
David Herman
AA Gill: wide of the mark?
On 11 January, AA Gill reviewed the BBC’s dramatisation of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’. He ended his review:
“With the violins of irony, The Diary of Anne Frank played all week against the background news of Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza. The comparison between the Franks, forced into hiding, and the Palestinians, proscribed, trapped and hopeless in this sliver of land that is the Middle East’s attic, was inescapable.”
On 23 January, Marilyn Booth (Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Edinburgh) reviewed Bahaa Taber’s novel, ‘Love in Exile’ in the TLS. She began her review by saying that she read the book “as the Israeli Air Force began bombarding Gaza.” They are moved to write this, of course, because they are moved by human suffering. However, only by certain kinds of human suffering…
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