The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies, translated by Natasha Lehrer (Swift, £14.99) This clever and vivid book by a historian of Vichy France falls somewhere between autobiographical novel and fictionalised memoir. It opens as a colourful story based on the author’s family: her grandmother’s morphine addiction, her aunt Zizi’s vanity (she “boasted that all she kept in her refrigerator were beauty products”), and her mother’s reluctance to talk about the past. But what were grandmother and Zizi doing in the pages of Nazi propaganda magazine Signal? The narrator learns her family were “Nazi sympathisers”, though the phrase hardly captures the zeal...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
