Points are “gone through” with the brisk efficiency of a presenter checking off items on a list; paragraph after paragraph begins either “Wilson” or “When/ Though Wilson … Instead we get an honest, dogged and defensive account of Wilson as solus rex, down to the last scrupulously detailed female foot, bottle of gin and preferred sexual technique.
Wilson’s own style – lucid, formal, sensual, filled with conviction and energy – remains his strongest attraction. The most fruitful approach would therefore seem to be a wide-ranging study such as Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey, using the central figure to illuminate the vanished cultural and social era in which he was an important player. The job description was outlined by Wilson himself in his essay on George Saintsbury: “The principal thrill of reading Saintsbury is the sensation of looking down on literature as with the comparative eye of God.” Wilson presumably aimed at a similar status, and to a large extent he succeeded in imposing his authority on the American scene during his lifetime But his significance is by no means self-evident today. Whose cranium could serve as the basis for those hypothetical sandwiches today? The “man of letters” with the clout to make and break reputations is an extinct species Then there was Cyril Connolly; now there’s Clive James.

World public opinion will not permit the Indonesians to get away with their misdeeds. The most helpful thing Suharto’s friends can do – and there are reports that, in its shame, the Australian government is trying to do it – is to think up for him as dignified as possible an exit from occupied East Timor, and then persuade him to take it.. “IF you can show me 20 books written approximately 20 years back that have as much guts and life now, I’ll eat them between slices of Edmund Wilson’s head.” Raymond Chandler’s defence of The Maltese Falcon says as much about Wilson’s reputation as it does about Dashiel Hammett’s. The message to General Suharto must be unmistakable: as long as your troops are illegally stationed in East Timor you will get no respite in any international forum from those who oppose their presence there.Similar messages go out to Malcolm Rifkind and Lady Chalker and other Western politicians as they scurry round in support of the Indonesian dictator. The omens for that sort of operation cannot be hopeful.Generations of Resistance is one of that growing list of books which are underpinning the reports from journalists on the spot and keeping the crimes committed against the East Timorese in the world spotlight. In November, as my bus rattled its way across the frontier between Indonesia and East Timor, and we made our way along the north coast towards Dili, I saw the sites where the settlers were being provided with new homes on Timorese land, much in the same way as successive Israeli governments have put their people into Palestine. In their haste to combine the relief of Java’s problems of overpopulation with the extension of Javanese hegemony over Indonesia’s 13,000 islands, the Indonesians have dreamed up the strategy of “transmigration”.

Dr Carey provides a narrative which presents unimpeachable academic analysis in a gripping style of writing which would be a credit to any best-selling novelist. Cox’s pictures put on record the horror of the Santa Cruz massacre as it happened and add scenes of everyday life which bring the territory and its people alive. Those new to the East Timor tragedy could do no better than to start here.Carey is particularly good on the principal threat to East Timorese life, the dumping of a mass of Indonesian settlers, estimated in Dili at more than 150,000, on Timorese land. Later that year, as they courageously filmed the Indonesians’ massacre of 271 unarmed demonstrators at the Santa Cruz cemetery in the East Timorese capital, Steve Cox with his camera and Max Stael with his television equipment justifiably caused much more stir. They changed the course of that territory’s history as they showed to the world the brutality of the occupying forces, and thereby put East Timor on the world’s political agenda for good.Now Peter Carey of Trinity College, Oxford, and Cox have brought out a fine book of text and pictures of East Timor. BAe’s arms business must never be in danger.Having been one of the first foreign journalists to penetrate occupied East Timor early in 1991, I was amazed at the general reaction that an account of the place provoked.

Consequently, Lynda Chalker’s Overseas Development Administration has been instructed to spend British aid money on further subsidising the business ventures of the Suharto family, who are already billionaires. In exchange for oil, the Australian government has gone as far as recognising the seizure of Timor, despite the fact that thousands of Timorese laid down their lives helping Australian troops against the Japanese in the Second World War.Washington has seen Suharto as an ally against the left; Bonn has seen him as a useful purchaser of a redundant East German navy; Whitehall has seen him as an important customer for British Aerospace Hawk warplanes. And they are doing so in defiance of unequivocal resolutions of the UN Security Council. The Permanent Members of that august body who moved so swiftly and decisively to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and reinstate its feudal rulers in 1991 are to this day, 20 years after the Indonesian invasion, sitting on their hands doing nothing to eject the invaders of East Timor. Western foreign ministers, from Shultz and Owen to Carrington and Juppe – not to mention their Russian and Chinese counterparts – have over the years shown themselves to be struck by that selective blindness which has allowed General Suharto’s troops to kill, rape and pillage to their heart’s content.