Silent Witness by Margaret Yorke

Silent Witness by Margaret Yorke

How did a community of a few thousand Jewish refugees become, in little over a century, a modern nation-state and homeland of half the world's Jews? Has modern Israel fulfilled the Zionist vision of becoming a nation like other nations, or is it still, in Biblical terns, a people that dwells alone?

Alan Dowty distils over half a century of study as an inside/outside analyst of Israel in tracing this remarkable story. It begins in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, when Jews fleeing Russian persecution established a renewed Jewish presence in their historic homeland. It continues through harsh struggle and in deep-rooted conflict with another people that sees Israel/Palestine equally as their homeland. Immensely successful by most standards, Israel today remains a center of contention and is still torn between its hard-earned role as a normal nation and the call of its particularistic, and unique, Jewish history.

Margaret Yorke (Margaret Beda Nicholson) was born in Surrey, England, in 1924 to John and Alison Larminie. She grew up in Dublin before returning to England in 1937 with her family, settling in Hampshire, however she now resides in a small village in Buckinghamshire. She worked as a driver for the Women's Royal Navy Service during WWII. She married in 1945, but the marriage barely lasted ten years, despite the fact that they had two children, a boy and a daughter. Her childhood love of literature was rekindled during her five years living near Stratford-upon-Avon, and she also worked as a bookseller and librarian in two Oxford colleges, the first woman to serve in Christ Church. She has traveled extensively and is particularly interested in Greece and Russia.

Her debut novel was published in 1957, although she didn't start writing crime fiction until 1970. Dr. Patrick Grant, an Oxford don and amateur detective who shares her love of Shakespeare, appears in a series of five novels. Additional crime and mystery novels followed, totaling forty-three, but the Grant novels were limited to five because, as she put it, writers utilizing a serial investigator are caught by their series. That prevents some of them from progressing as authors.

She takes pride in the fact that many of her books are about ordinary people who find themselves in exceptional situations that are either dangerous or just horrifying. This aspect of her writing ensures a devoted following among readers, who invariably relate with some of the characters and recognize issues that may arise in daily life. Indeed, she claims that complex plots are less important to her than characters, and that when she writes, I don't influence the characters, they manipulate me. Critics have described her as having a marvellous use of language, and she has been compared to P.D.

Rendells, James and Ruth She is a former chairman of the Crime Writers' Association and was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 1999, after previously receiving the Swedish Academy of Detection's Martin Beck Prize.