Me on Broadway. Not a phrase that immediately comes to mind, and certainly not one that occurred to me in 1983 when I’d just started my career as a journalist at The New Statesman. But I feature, or at least my voice does, large and significantly in the play Giant, starring John Lithgow, that has now transferred from London to New York.
The reason is that back when I started at the Statesman, just out of university and somewhat in awe of pretty much everything, I was asked to interview children’s author Roald Dahl. He’d written about a book called God Cried, concerning Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and what was supposed to be a review turned into an antisemitic scream. Dahl wrote of “a race of people” who had “switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers,” and that Washington was “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions” that the Americans “dare not defy” Israel.
