There are a few things that Hitler and Stalin shared, despite the obvious differences. Both men began their lives deeply committed to their faith, and considered life as clergymen, before turning on the church. Both…
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Writing history has one serious problem: how does an author maintain suspense when the outcome is known in advance? Timothy Ryback does this very successfully in Takeover where one can easily imagine another result in…
What a strange book. It has elements of time travel, but it’s not really a time travel book. Much of it consists of an interrogation taking place we don’t know where in which the interrogator…
This is one of a crop of very short biographies of Soviet dictator published in recent years. Here is what I loved about it: Harold Shukman is a well-known academic, an expert on Soviet history….
Public opinion polls in Israel consistently show that Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government cannot win the next election. The parties of the centre and left are consistently polling higher than those of the right. And it’s…
First of all, that’s a great title for a spy thriller. But “Red Widow” is not a great spy thriller. Having spent many hours reading it, I don’t see the point of the story. Not…
The Left has a long and proud history of anti-militarism. One cannot help but look back in admiration at the American Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs who went to prison after making an anti-war speech…
Last week I interviewed Lizaveta Merliak, who runs Salidarnast, a group campaigning in support of the embattled independent trade union movement in Belarus. Liza was an activist in the Belarusian unions who was forced to…
I read best-selling author Griffiths’ latest novel, which involved time travel, and in the end I wasn’t impressed. But I have friends who are really hooked on her crime fiction starring Dr Ruth Galloway, an…
At the start of the Cold War, in 1952, a book came out in the USA and Britain entitled “The Russian Menace to Europe”. The authors were listed as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A…