Eric Lee

In his bestselling book “Archangel”, Robert Harris creates an entire modern political thriller around Stalin’s great secret — which is revealed only in the second half of the book. And that incredible secret turns out to be … Stalin had a son!
Um, sorry Robert, but for the those of us who know anything at all about the Soviet dictator, this “revelation” had something of the effect of Dr. Evil’s demand that he be paid one million dollars not to destroy the world. In real life, Stalin had two sons, and a daughter.
Perhaps because of this disappointment, I waited a few years before trying another novel which revolved around Stalin’s great secret.

(more…)

I’ve just come back from a week-long holiday in the Channel Islands, spending time on both Guernsey and Sark. In addition to the rural quiet, spectacular scenery and delicious local food, one attraction for me was to see the one part of the British Isles that came under German Nazi rule during the Second World War. (Pictured: German gun emplacement on Guernsey’s north shore.)

(more…)

Alan Furst is routinely hailed as possibly the greatest living writer of traditional espionage fiction. He sets his books in exotic times and places — this one, for example, recounts stories of the French resistance and is mostly set in Paris in the early 1940s.

(more…)

If you had asked me a week ago what I thought of this book, I’d have answered — “It’s much more readable than Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
That’s not what I think now.
Writing books debunking religion is a good thing, and there are many of them. But I was hoping for a more powerful and effective book by Hitchens, who certainly knows how to write well.

(more…)

For some time now I have been a student of the decades long secret war between Russian revolutionaries and the tsarist police. (Attentive readers of this website will be aware that my research culminated a decade ago in a book about the possibility that Stalin had been a tsarist polie agent.) From time to time, new books come out about the Okhrana, though these are usually aimed at academic audiences. Not so Richard Pipes’ 2003 volume, The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia.

(more…)