Heroic Failure

Fintan O’Toole

Head of Zeus, £11.99

In his columns for the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole has been one of the most astute commentators on Brexit, and here he offers up his analysis of the forces in the English psyche which brought it about. Nor does he pull any punches, diagnosing a national epidemic of self-pity which settled in after the Second World War: a sense that it would have been better to have been invaded by Hitler than to stand by and watch far more battle-scarred economies faring so much better in peacetime. “In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized,” he writes, suggesting that Brexiteers have projected the role of coloniser on to the EU so that they can bask in “the exuberant victimhood of anti-colonial resistance”, a glow fanned by the peculiarly English cult of heroic failure. He writes animatedly and to devastating effect, his framing of Brexit as a “weird psychodrama” raising some uncomfortable questions.

A Maigret Christmas and other stories

Georges Simenon

Penguin, £7.99

Inspector Maigret’s melancholy Christmas morning mood is interrupted by news from across the street of a young girl being visited in the night by Santa Claus, who gave her a doll and prised up some floorboards. Unusually, this is an investigation he can conduct from home, which he seems to find quite a satisfying way to spend Christmas. There are three seasonal stories in this 1951 collection, but only the first features Maigret himself. In the second, a police telephonist is pushed out of his usual auxiliary role into the thick of the action. In the last, a man shockingly shoots himself in the head in a restaurant. Two witnesses, Martine and Jeanne, are interviewed by police, leading to a more traditionally uplifting festive conclusion. Simenon is masterfully economical, telling us volumes about Maigret’s home life with the most minimal strokes, and, even though the Inspector barely leaves his apartment, the author manages to convey the flavour of Paris on Christmas Day.

Jewish comedy: A Serious History

Jeremy Dauber

W.W. Norton, £11.99

Drawing on the 15 years he’s spent lecturing on the subject, Jeremy Dauber delves into the rich, complex and continually fascinating history of Jewish comedy, tracing the evolution of various strands of humour, including irony, vulgarity, bookish wit, folksiness and joking as a response to persecution. His exploration of how a distinctive voice developed within a closed, largely self-regulated community reaches back as far as the plot-twists of the Book of Esther, the earthiness of the Book of Judges and centuries of Talmudic debates, taking in satirical rabbinic poetry from the Middle Ages and the cultural fusion of 11th Century Spain, all the way up to The Daily Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm. In a work of substantial, scholarly research that nevertheless has room for some excellent jokes, Dauber provides much insight into how Jewish people have regarded themselves and each other down the centuries, and how Jewish comedians, having come to define American comedy, are still at the cutting edge.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT