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…
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)…
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…
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….
Dan Gallin, the former general secretary of the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) passed away at his home in Geneva at the end of last month at the age of 94. He was to me,…
From the very first page of this compelling book, you’re in the thick of it. James Bloodworth describes participating in a course to teach him how to pick up girls in London’s Leicester Square. That…
I must be the last person on the planet to discover Dean Koontz, who has sold something like 450,000,000 books. (I’m not making that up.). This one is a novella, part of series about a,…
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…
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…