PanThe Times (UK)I’ve recounted Sebba’s thesis as fairly as I can, so let me add, without heat or rancour, that it is wildly false and the book is an intellectual disgrace. The publisher bills it as an account of ;America’s Dreyfus case;, heedless that Alfred Dreyfus was framed on bogus espionage charges whereas Ethel Rosenberg was not. If the problem were merely that the book is soft on crime and soft on communism, that at least would be an arguable historical perspective; yet this notional biography fails even that test, for the Ethel Rosenberg it depicts never existed. Sebba manages to impute noble qualities to her heroine by the simple expedient of ignoring the definitive evidence that Ethel was guilty as charged ... Sebba is hazy too about the scale of the spies’ illicit activities ... Although Sebba advances the truism that in a free society \'anyone is entitled to hold whatever political beliefs they want\', the Rosenbergs were not persecuted for their politics but convicted for their crimes ... Sebba’s incuriosity runs through this alternately saccharine and obtuse book, of which nothing good can be said and from which nothing but harm will arise.
