Having devoured Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist (2022) with fascination, I wasn’t going to miss reading his latest, The Traitors Circle (2025).
The former was a harrowing account of Rudolf Vrba, the eponymous escapee from Auschwitz, and his attempts to testify to the world about the evils being done there. It raised the uncomfortable question: Why did it take the world so long to believe him, and act on it?
The Traitors Circle is animated by a similarly uncomfortable question: What would you have done? We flatter ourselves to think that we might have resisted rather than colluded, participated or condoned, when so few did.
Mandelson, Epstein and the ‘deceitfulness of wealth’
Our headlines have been dominated by the drip-fed horror of the Epstein files; the realisation that rich and powerful people …