Collected works
Tony Harrison
Quite simply, the best living inheritor of Milton’s anger, skill and grandeur. From his early sonnets about being the son of northern working-class parents to his haunting ballad about a charred Iraqi soldier [first printed in the Guardian], he tells the truth about war and class. He has invented a new form of television documentary, the ‘film/poem’, in which he speaks about Hiroshima and the Holocaust, Alzheimer’s and the collapse of Soviet communism. The music of his verse makes you want to dance; his Yorkshire humour lights up the darkest landscape.

Everyman
Philip Roth (Jonathan Cape, 2006)
Sex and, increasingly, death are the subjects of America’s finest living novelist. Everyman (2006) is a good introduction to his world of inexhaustible talkers, seductive women and restless men. Or, like many other readers, you could start with his controversial novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), which put masturbation into the heartland of middle-class Jewish America. Roth is an inveterate questioner and troublemaker. In his sixth decade he began a series of big novels, which take on American politics and history, notably American Pastoral, a novelist’s take on the Vietnam war, ‘the indigenous American berserk’. Like all the best novelists he’s both serious and hilarious.

Illuminations
Walter Benjamin (Schocken Books, 1969)
A collection of essays by the outstanding German critic and philosopher, who committed suicide in 1940 on the Franco-Spanish border, running away from the Nazis. A friend of Brecht, and also of Gershom Scholem, the great modern scholar of Jewish mysticism, Benjamin is the subtlest Marxist thinker I know. This collection contains essays that remain necessary for thinking about the world now: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Theses on the Philosophy of History, which begins with Paul Klee’s painting of ‘the angel of history’, transfixed by the debris of the past. ‘Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.’ I re-read Benjamin because he was a communist with an indelible sense of tragedy.

The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
On a hot summer’s day by a swimming-pool in Bristol in 1962, I was chatting up a young woman with liquid eyes, sweet-talking her by reading out chunks of Lessing’s novel. She asked me if she could borrow it. I never saw her or the book again, and had to buy another copy.

I love this book because it breaks open all the forms. Lessing describes it as ‘an attempt to break a form; to break certain forms of consciousness and go beyond them. While writing it, I found I did not believe some of the things I thought I believed: or rather, that I hold in my mind at the same time beliefs and ideas that are apparently contradictory. Why not? We are, after all, living in the middle of a whirlwind.’

King Lear
William Shakespeare
I shall take with me the complete works of Shakespeare, but this is the play I will return to most often. Speeches of it are already engraved in my memory. I imagine myself quoting out loud to bewildered penguins taking refuge from global warming:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these?

There’s nothing in world drama to match Lear’s account of civilisation’s breakdown, torture, the journey to sanity through madness, love reconquered too late. There’s even a succinct description of socialism out of the mouth of a character caught in Shakespeare’s world-shaking storm: ‘Distribution should undo excess /And each man have enough.’

Poems 1913-1956
Bertolt Brecht (Methuen, 1980)
A life that ran from anarchy and appetite to a watchful communist hope, a lifetime that drove Brecht into exile, ‘changing countries more often than shoes’, is refracted in these indestructible poems. Our greatest Marxist playwright, Brecht has survived the nitpicking of cold war critics and the subservience of Soviet cultural commissars. He wrote his best plays – Mother Courage, The Good Person of Setzuan, The Life of Galileo – as a refugee without a theatre to see them put on. Then he returned to East Germany, where he was given a theatre and created one powerful production after another, though tussling with party bureaucrats. His poems became the repository of his true thoughts. In 1953, when there was a workers’ rising against the government, he couldn’t resist writing this classic statement against tyranny:

After the uprising of the 17th of June

The Secretary of the Writers’ Union

Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee

Stating that the people

Had forfeited the confidence of the government

And could win it back only

By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

(Translated by Derek Bowman)

Michael Kustow has just completed A Passage from India, based on his life in 2006/7, and also written The Half, featuring Simon Annand’s photographs of actors in their dressing-rooms, which Faber and Faber will publish this autumn

The soldier

You are a member of the Israeli army and have to pacify a Palestinian refugee camp. You know such camps are the ‘hotbeds’ of your enemies. They know you are coming, and have already blocked the main roads into the camp. Although you could smash through their barriers, you know they have hidden in houses and rooftops, and will hit you with merciless sniper fire. You have to flush them out, without using the roads and alleys of the camp. You have to go into people’s homes.

This is what you do, as described by Eyal Weizman and his interviewees in this book.

You position your squad outside the house wall. Military intelligence will have already given you a computer model of the house – every Palestinian house in Gaza and the West Bank has been mapped digitally in three dimensions. Using explosives or a large hammer, you punch a hole through the wall and climb in shouting. It is important to shout. You may throw in a stun grenade before entering.

Aisha, a young Palestinian woman, describes what it feels like. ‘You’re sitting in your living room, where the family watches television after the evening meal … The wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after another, screaming orders. You have no idea if they’re after you, if they’ve come to take over your home or if your home just lies on the route to somewhere else. The children are screaming, panicking. Is it possible even to imagine the horror experienced by a five- year-old child as four, six, eight, 12 soldiers, their faces painted black, submachine guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through the wall?’

The town planner

This is what you do if you are an Israeli town-planner intending to grab Palestinian land. You invent a new, constantly shifting legal terminology, masking your aims with sanitised words like ‘survey land’, ‘state land’, ‘security land’, all of which enable your nation to seize the land without recourse. You know that most Palestinians are too poor or intimidated to go to court to contest your actions. You dig out a land law of 1858 from the Ottoman empire. It states that if a farmer has not cultivated his land for three consecutive years, he forfeits ownership. Since you have cut off his water, he has not been able to farm the land, so – Jahweh be praised – another tract of earth to add to the Land of Israel.

The policeman

This is what you do if you are a Palestinian policeman on duty at a frontier checkpoint, regulating the movements of Palestinians. Sitting in front of a mirror, you take the applicant’s passport, examine it, put it into a drawer beneath your desktop. On the other side of the mirror, an Israeli security official takes the passport, runs it through computer checks and returns it with either a red label permitting the owner to enter or a white label refusing them permission to do so. This is what is known as ‘Palestinian autonomy’. The mirror is one-way, like the policy that erected it.

The architect

This is what you write if, like Eyal Weizman, a young Tel Aviv architect, you are against what your government is doing: ‘Temporariness is now the law of the occupation … temporary encirclement and temporary closures, temporary transit permits, temporary revocation of transit permits, temporary enforcement of an elimination policy, temporary change in the open-fire orders … The occupier is an unrestrained, almost boundless sovereign, because when everything is temporary almost anything, any crime, any form of violence is acceptable, because the temporariness grants it a licence, the licence of the state of emergency.’

You find yourself describing an Alice- through-the-looking-glass world, where everything is topsy-turvy, where a dozen different ‘master plans’ from competing generals or politicians or generals hoping to become politicians may disagree on details but all lead to the same destination: dispossessions of Palestinians.

The map

Eyal Weizman decided to fight this dispossession with his professional skills. Working with the human rights organisation B’Tselem, taking aerial photographs of the occupied territories, digging into municipal records and obliging the Israeli government to make public its master plans for settlement expansion and land annexation, he made a new map.

It showed the location and extent of every settlement, extended city limit and military base in Israel and the occupied territories. It charts every encroachment. It looks like a diseased lung.

This map is the basis of Hollow Land, Weizman’s calmly devastating account of the bent laws and shifting regulations, the tactically vague language, the rivalries between power-hungry generals and the sheer chutzpah which has enabled Israeli planners and regulators to get away with the takeover.

As a Jew, I am ashamed to see such ingenuity and energy, such high-tech jargon and theory poured into ever-more inventive ways of, forgive the expression, fucking up the neighbour. Is this what the spirit of Maimonides, Spinoza and Heine has engendered: a new wave of academicians of counter-insurgency, inverting the subversive insights of Foucault and Deleuze not to demystify power but to mask it? Is the work of the military analysts of Zion a testbed for America’s ‘war against terror’?

The exhibition

This is what happened to Eyal Weizman. In 2002 he and his partner Rafi Segal won a competition to design the Israeli pavilion at the World Congress of Architecture in Berlin. Their pavilion, they announced, would house an exhibition called The politics of Israeli architecture.

Drawing on Eyal’s maps and researches, it would be the first international display of the spatial form of the settlements in the occupied territories and the political and military policies that underpin the settlers’ ranch-houses and gardens and swimming pools on the West Bank hilltops – safe and comfortable ‘gated communities’ like those of South Africa or California.

Shortly before the congress, the invitation to Weizman and Segal was withdrawn by the Israeli Association of United Architects, and they were forbidden to distribute their catalogue. The association’s head said, ‘The association thinks that the ideas in the catalogue are not architecture. Heaven help us if this is what Israel has to show. As though only settlements … were built here … My natural instincts tell me to destroy the catalogues, but I won’t do that. I won’t burn books.’

Eyal Weizman moved to London, where he is now director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmith’s College. And he has written this scholarly and trenchant book. Apart from its capacity to arouse indignation, it is a wonderful read: well structured, sharply phrased (he speaks of the Palestinian Authority as ‘a prosthetic political system’), letting ‘the facts on the ground’ speak for themselves.

It shows how archaeology and geology have been used by these cowboys of the new frontier to pave the way for suburbanite settlers fleeing Tel Aviv for the good life at cut-price rates, and for religious zealots who, though they don’t recognise the State of Israel, hold onto every sanctified dunam (1,000 square metres) of that Land of Israel hailed and hallowed in the Old Testament.

Michael Kustow is a producer, playwright and biographer of Peter Brook. his book In Search of Jerusalem is due out this autumn.

But in the same programme I gave him to read the greatest love-poem in the Bible, the Song of Songs: ‘Stay with me flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.’ His voice was a caress of tenderness. The fury, the tenacity, makes him a fighter; the tenderness reminds us he is a poet.

2. When he and I worked at the National Theatre, he agreed to read other people’s poetry once a year, on the Olivier Theatre stage. The first time I chose Louis Macneice’s Autumn Journal (1939), that lyric diary of a man on the threshold of a war. MacNeice’s speaker, like a documentarist in verse, sees peace collapse around him in a hundred details. Harold, dry-voiced, found the horror of what lay ahead in these simple lines:

As I go out I see a windscreen-wiper

In an empty car

Wiping away like mad and I feel astounded

That things have gone so far.

3. The pleasure of witnessing Harold’s irascibility. (And doubtless the pain of being on its receiving end). At one planning meeting of the National Theatre directorate, Jonathan Miller put forward his iconoclastic plan for a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest. His idea, he announced, was to have Lady Bracknell played by a man. He illustrated this at some length with examples of ambiguities in the text, homosexuality and the treatment of women in Victorian times. The room fell silent. Then Harold cuttingly said, ‘Jonathan, if Oscar Wilde had wanted Lady Bracknell to be played by a man, he would have fucking said so.’