Best Books 2012
One might wonder why bother write another book on Alfred Dreyfus. Some 600 have already been published. The novelist Piers Paul Read, however, brings a sweeping historical perspective and literary verve to The Dreyfus Affair: The Story of the Most Infamous Miscarriage of Justice in French History (Bloomsbury, €27.00). Dreyfus was a bad witness, an unattractive character — gauche, haughty and standoffish, which led in part to his downfall; the other element was his misfortune to get caught up in the grubby left-right politics of the country that emerged from the incendiary 1789 French Revolution.
