He is recorded to have laughed only once, at a picnic with Ernst Jünger in the Harz Mountains. Jünger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage… - Paul Johnson

He was the prototype of that characteristic figure of the modern age, the Angry Young Man.

Josephus noted, ‘the Sadducees draw their following only from the rich, and the people do not support them, whereas the Pharisees have popular allies’. He relates that at the end of the civil war, Alexander returned in triumph to Jerusalem, with many of his Jewish enemies among his captives and then ‘did one of the most barbarous actions in the world…for as he was feasting with his concubines, in the sight of all the city, he ordered about eight hundred of them to be crucified, and while they were living he ordered the throats of their children and wives to be cut before their eyes’.63 There is a reference to this sadistic episode in one of the Qumran scrolls: ‘the lion of wrath…when he hangs men up alive’.

Simon was killed in Betar. Akiva was captured, imprisoned, finally tortured to death, the flesh torn from his body ‘by iron combs’. Dio says that of the rebels ‘very few were saved’. The Roman vengeance was awe-inspiring. Fifty forts where the rebels had put up resistance were destroyed and 985 towns, villages and agricultural settlements. Dio says 580,000 Jews died in the fighting ‘and countless numbers of starvation, fire and the sword. Nearly the entire land of Judaea was laid waste.’.126 In the late fourth century, St Jerome reported from Bethlehem a tradition that, after the defeat, there were so many Jewish slaves for sale that the price dropped to less than a horse.