The Good Listener

Helen Bamber: A Life Against Cruelty

Neil Belton

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571295272
• Year: 2012

'Essential reading... A horrifying account of the worst that human beings can do to each other. Neil Belton's synthesis of biography and history is masterly.' Anthony Storr, Sunday Times

Helen Bamber went to Belson in 1945 to work with survivors of the camp. She was just twenty. Since then her life has been involved with the worst side of the last half-century. In 1985, at the age of sixty, she set up an organisation devoted to helping victims of torture and to bearing witness against the fact of torture. This is her story. It is also a haunting unusual narrative of the post-war world. This 2012 edition offers a new introduction by the author.

'The story of Bamber's life acts as a framework or prism through which some of the worst events of this century of horrors are addressed.' Times Literary Supplement

'[Belton] writes beautifully about an ugly subject... with compassion but also with clarity.' Scotsman

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PREFACE TO THE 2012 EDITION
• PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
• 1 : THE LIBERTIES OF BERWICK
• 2 : THE JIGSAW
• 3 : GRIT IN THE WHEEL
• 4 : THE DISCIPLINE OF LOVE
• 5 : A STORM FROM PARADISE
• 6 : TAKING HISTORIES
• 7 : POOR GHOST
• 8 : LEARNED ON THE BODY
• 9 : REMAKING THE WORLD
• REFERENCES
• PERMISSIONS
• INDEX
• Copyright