THE
SUNDAY
TIMES
BESTSELLERS
GENERAL HARDBACKS
Last
weekWeeks in
top 101
Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?
Julie Smith
(M Joseph £14.99)
Clinical psychologist’s advice for
navigating life’s ups and downs
(6,415)142
Bigger Than Us/Fearne Cotton
(Ebury £16.99) Advice on love, communication and
awareness to inspire happiness and hope (4,810)423
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse/Charlie
Mackesy (Ebury £16.99) An illustrated
fable containing gentle life philosophy (4,420)3 1214
Manifest/Roxie Nafousi
(M Joseph £14.99) An introduction to the personal
development practice of manifestation (3,825)245
Big Panda and Tiny Dragon/James Norbury
(M Joseph £14.99) Illustrated, mindful tale of
friendship inspired by Buddhist philosophy (2,790)6136
Lily’s Promise/Lily Ebert and Dov Forman
(Macmillan £18.99) Holocaust survivor’s story of her
life in Hungary and her time at Auschwitz (2,480)—37
And Away.../Bob Mortimer
(Simon & Schuster £20) The Shooting Stars and
Gone Fishing funnyman’s autobiography (1,945)7208
What I Wish People Knew About Dementia/Wendy
Mitchell (Bloomsbury £14.99) Dispels myths and
stereotypes of living with dementia (1,940)529
Windswept & Interesting/Billy Connolly
(Two Roads £25) Memoir by the comedian who rose
to fame after an appearance on Parkinson (1,765)81610
Stolen Focus/Johann Hari
(Bloomsbury £20) Why our attention spans are
getting shorter and what we can do about it (1,615)92GENERAL PAPERBACKS
Last
weekWeeks
in top 101
Breath
James Nestor
(Penguin Life £9.99)
An exploration of the lost art
and hidden science of breathing
(3,775)862
Atomic Habits/James Clear
(Random House £16.99) The miniscule changes
that can grow into life-altering outcomes (3,625)2243
Good Vibes, Good Life/Vex King
(Hay House £10.99) How positive thinking, self-love
and overcoming fear lead to lasting happiness (2,985)3 1014
Islands of Abandonment/Cal Flyn
(Wm Collins £9.99) An exploration of extraordinary
places where humans no longer live (2,760)645
The Power of Geography/Tim Marshall
(Elliott & Thompson £9.99) A study of ten regions that
could define global politics in the future (2,455)7186
Recovery/Gavin Francis
(Wellcome Collection £4.99) Reflections on illness,
recovery and the power of convalescence (1,920)527
Wintering/Katherine May
(Rider & Co £9.99) A meditation on the fallow periods
of life and the importance of rest and repair (1,870)18 18
12 Rules for Life/Jordan B Peterson
(Penguin £10.99) A psychologist’s set of principles
for a responsible and meaningful life (1,860)15 269
Positivity/Paul McKenna
(Welbeck £14.99) On using your creative imagination
to defeat entrenched negative mindsets (1,745)4410
Spoon-Fed/Tim Spector
(Vintage £9.99) Busting common food myths
created by bad science and the food industry (1,735)12BOOKS
British treatment of wartime Jewish refugees is vividly exposed
sought safe haven in Britain,
yet in 1940 found themselves
arrested in Oxford, Cambridge
and other centres of learning
and culture where they were
practising their professions,
and detained for months in
camps, notably Hutchinson
on the Isle of Man.
Hundreds of artists,
architects, musicians and
scholars were confined in
conditions of acute
discomfort, in response to
press hysteria during that
summer when Britain was
threatened with invasion.
The Daily Express led the pack
of sensationalists, warning of
a potential “Fifth Column” of
Nazi agents among foreign
residents. It headlined
fantasies about German
stormtroopers disguised in
blouses, who allegedly
parachuted into Rotterdam.
The Daily Mail urged: “Act!
Act! Act!... every German is
an agent.”
Nobody enforced effectiveYet the revelation about
this scene, reported in disgust
by a young officer to his
father, a senior civil servant,
is that the tormentors were
not Nazis but British soldiers
and police, herding Jewish
internees aboard the
troopship Dunera, bound for
Australia in July 1940. Worse
still, some of the persecuted
Jews were survivors from the
Arandora Star, another such
vessel sunk a fortnight earlier
in the Atlantic by a U-boat.
The Dunera’s passengers
reported that during their
57-day voyage refugees were
packed in appalling conditions,
half-starved, again pillaged.
The senior officer and NCOs
responsible were court-
martialled, but their crimes
could not be erased.
Moreover, this represented
only a by-blow of the much
bigger story, told by the
journalist Simon Parkin, of
tens of thousands of Jewish
fugitives from Hitler who hadHISTORY
Max Hastings
The Island of Extraordinary
Captives A True Story of an
Artist, a Spy and a Wartime
Scandal by Simon Parkin
Sceptre £20 pp496
It is an unbearably familiar
image: Jews being harried by
soldiers, some of them drunk,
who stripped them of
watches, spectacles, fountain
pens. “That which wasn’t
pilfered by the guards,” the
author of this powerful book
writes, “was thrown onto a
gathering pile in the rain.”
A policeman rummaged
amid discarded clothing,
selecting items for his own use.
When one captive, a musician,
begged molesting soldiers to
keep dry the violin that he
carried, the instrument was
wrenched from his hands,
tearing off a fingernail.
discrimination in the
round-ups of “enemy aliens”.
Sane voices, who saw the
detentions as a blot on
Britain’s status as a bastion
of freedom and democracy,
went unheeded, and pointed
out that some of those seized
had earlier been held in
Hitler’s camps.
The art historian Klaus
Hinrichsen was denounced bya neighbour who believed that
the rhythmic tapping on his
wall was caused by this nasty
foreigner signalling to the
enemy. In truth he was making
love to his girlfriend, but was
nonetheless dispatched to
Hutchinson. At another camp
the conductor Leo Wurmser
transcribed from memory
into exercise books the score
of Fidelio, then performedl For months, only Richard
Osman has achieved the feat
of having more than one
book on the bestseller lists.
But Colleen Hoover, who
writes young adult and
romance novels, has outdone
him with not one, not two,
but three books in fiction
paperbacks.
l Autumn’s batch of celebrity
memoirs tend to have very
long shelf lives, but we’re
now down to just two: Bob
Mortimer and Billy Connolly.
Which of the comedians will
hang on for the longest? Our
money’s on Mortimer.
The lists are prepared by and
the data is supplied by (and
copyrighted to) Nielsen BookScan,
and are taken from the TCM for
the week ending 29/01/22.
Figures shown are sales for
the seven-day period.
A shameful chapter
24 6 February 2022