A publisher I know used to say that if you want to sell more books, put “Hitler” in the title. In this case, someone may have been taking his advice. It was not Hitler who…
Ryan Holiday is a young-ish American marketing executive who seems to have stumbled upon stoicism and turned the philosophy of the ancient Greeks into a real money spinner. His books are fast reads and mega-best-sellers,…
Rough sleepers have returned to Finsbury Park and their various belongings lay pressed against the walls of a railway bridge. Just above where they sleep, the walls are plastered with posters asking “Are you a…
A little more than 85 years ago, on 28 March 1939, the Spanish civil war ended. The fascist forces under the command of General Franco entered the capital, Madrid, and it was all over. Spain…
Writing a biography of a man as complex — and elusive — as Boris Savinkov is not an easy task. But Richard Spence has done an exemplary job of this. HIs 1991 book is comprehensive…
While there have been countless books and articles about V.I. Lenin, whose death in 1924 has been marked in this newspaper and elsewhere, there are some Russian revolutionaries of that time who have long been…
Something strange is happening in American and British politics this year. According to a report in this week’s Sunday Times, the Labour Party under the leadership of Keir Starmer seems on course not just to…
This 1930 book is not about that Russian secret police — the one that comes to mind — but about an earlier one, the one which author A.T. Vassilyev commanded until the collapse of the…
The 3,700 female workers in the Mahalla textile factories were furious. The Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, had earlier in the month raised the minimum wage to 6,000 Egyptian pounds — the equivalent of just…
The Socialist Revolutionary Party, like other groups working in opposition to the autocratic regime that ruled Russia until 1917, was rife with secret police agents. The most famous of these, Ievno Azef, rose to become…