David Aaronovitch

David Morris Aaronovitch (born 8 July 1954) is an English journalist, broadcaster and author. He is the author of Paddling to Jerusalem: An Aquatic Tour of Our Small Country (2000), Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History (2009) and Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists (2016). He won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 2001, and the What the Papers Say "Columnist of the Year" award for 2003. He has written for The Independent, The Guardian and The Times.

David Aaronovitch in 2012

Quotes

• But, [John] Pilger objected, "Amnesty produced a catalogue of Saddam's killings that amounted mostly to hundreds every year, not millions. It is an appaling record that does not require the exaggeration of state-inspired propaganda".
  In fact Pilger's own source said (unquoted by him) that, in addition to the number of known executions Amnesty had also collected information on around 17,000 cases of disappearances, over the last 20 years, and "the real figure may be much higher".
• During the Anfal anti-Kurdish campaign in 1987 as many as 180,000 Kurds disappeared. At Halabja, in one incident alone, more people were killed than in the whole of this latest Gulf war. The most conservative death toll attached to the repression of the Shia uprising in 1991 was 30,000. One million died in the Iran-Iraq war started by Saddam.
  And this is reduced by Pilger to "hundreds every year".
  • "Lies and the Left", The Observer (27 April 2003), p. 29
  • Not clearly identified as an Observer article in the online source, this article can also be found here.

• When the discussion gets under way, a number of things become apparent. The first is that the people here are mostly very bright, very well-informed and anything but swivel-eyed saddos. The second is that sci-fi and fantasy are not, as I'd imagined, boys-only territories. Half the people attending are women, and mostly feminists at that. Perhaps because the creation of alternative worlds allows imaginary spaces in which sexism and male awfulness simply do not exist. (In the afternoon I was part of a small otherwise all-female audience for two women librarians discussing censorship in children's sci-fi. I learnt a lot.) More than anything these people — men and women — seemed to want to be writers. They had a detailed appreciation of plotting and characterisation, and seemed to seek advice about their own projects whenever they could.
  • "My brother the sci fi fanatic", The Times (5 March 2011).
  • On a "Science Fiction Multimedia Convention" at the Britannia Hotel, Coventry, attended with Ben Aaronovitch.

• [On his mother] She was disapproving when I grew my hair long and even more disapproving when, a few years later, I cut it again. I had, in a sense, let my own hair down.
  • Extract from Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists, London: Jonathan Cape (2016), as cited by Rachel Cooke in "David Aaronovitch: Me, Mum, Dad… and Stalin", The Observer (10 January 2016)

• The left's vice has always been self-righteousness, just as the right's is smugness. But when you add the sense of entitlement that is characteristic of so many of the younger middle-class people in Britain, you can end up with an impatience with compromise coupled to a belief that anything that is strongly felt must somehow be enacted.
  • "Corbynites are more like schoolkids than Trots", The Times (25 August 2016).

About Aaronovitch

• The grand-paternal Aaronovitches came to England as Jewish refugees — "aliens" as the 1906 anti-immigration legislation called them — fleeing the murderous Russian pogroms. They scraped in just before the door closed on their kind. Aaronovitch's paternal grandfather drifted into the east London rag trade. Buttonholes were the illiterate old needleman's speciality. David's paternal grandmother spoke Yiddish all her life. The book's central focus is on David's parents. They are not, for him, mum and dad. He uses their first names — Lavender and Sam — throughout. It is as if he is holding them up with forceps.
  • John Sutherland "Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists by David Aaronovitch", The Times (23 January 2016)
  • From a review of Party Animals. Aaronovitch's parents were long-standing members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.