Welcome to Europe
For many years, people in the U.K. could comfortably boast that unlike continental European countries, we didn’t have Nazis. We had a far Right, of course, but even that struggled to win seats in Parliament. …
Articles by admin
Review: Lenin in Zurich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I first read this book nearly half a century ago, when it was published in English. At the time, I remember not liking it very much — and I had loved pretty much everything else…
Review: I Rediscover Russia, by Isaac Don Levine
Isaac Don Levine had a remarkable track record of writing breakthrough books about the twentieth century, routinely missing the main point. His 1917 book on the Russian Revolution failed to mention Lenin and the Bolsheviks….
Lenin in Zurich – 2025
A little more than a century ago, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya left their two-room apartment at Spiegelgasse 14 in Zurich, never to return. They travelled to Russia through Germany at the…
“Anti-Israel” does not equal “left-wing”
I was talking the other day to a young man who was patiently explaining to me that to be “left” is to be “anti-Israel”. There was no difference at all in his mind. And he…
Ninotchka
To mark my birthday, we invited several dozen friends to join us yesterday in watching the 1939 film classic “Ninotchka” starring Greta Garbo. We rented out a local cinema for the occasion. Here is what…
Review: The Battle of Britain: Myth and Reality, by Richard Overy
Richard Overy is a first-class historian and an excellent writer. He’s also an expert on the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Second World War, so this short book was full of promise. It lived…
Zohran Mamdani
If elected in November, Zohran Mamdani will be the third democratic socialist mayor of New York City in the last 35 years. His predecessors included David Dinkins, a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC)…
Review: What the Night Brings, by Mark Billingham
The publication of a new Mark Billingham novel is always a cause for celebration and this one is no different. Well, it is different, actually. It marks the return of Billingham’s iconic London police detective…
Review: The Story of My Life, by Father George Gapon
Many people with only a passing famililarity with Russian history will have heard about the revolution of 1905 — and about the massacre of unarmed workers by the Tsar’s troops in January of that year….