My father, to particularise, really did believe, or affect to believe, that the French were collaborators, that three Englishmen with a Bren gun could hold off the entire Italian army, that America could do no wrong.
‘Terrorist! Terrorist!’ he would yell in the early 1980s, whenever the face of the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin appeared on the television screen, which seemed inexplicable until you realised that back in 1946, in Palestine, Begin was the commander of the Irgun, the direct-action Zionists who lobbed Molotov cocktails into cafés frequented by British servicemen.
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