DIARY OF A CRISIS: Israel in Turmoil, by Saul Friedländer

“What sort of diary should I like mine to be?” Virginia Woolf asked — in her diary — in 1919, before attempting an answer: “Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.” The immediacy of writing without much time for reflection ensured a welcome mode of unthinking, Woolf observed. A diary, she had written a few months earlier, “sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap.”