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…
Elly Griffiths is the author of two very successful series of novels, knocking off dozens of titles. She apparently has a huge fanbase. This book promises the be the first of a series featuring Ali…
As Karl Marx famously wrote in 1852, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as…
“Both history and psychoanalysis are sciences of memory, both are professionally committed to skepticism, both trace causes in the past, both seek to penetrate behind pioues professions and subtle evasions.” So concludes historian Peter Gay…
“More than 100 female prisoners were raped and then burned alive during a jailbreak in the Congolese city of Goma, according to the UN.” That’s from a BBC report a few days ago. This horrific…
This attractive, well-illustrated short biography of Stalin is part of a new series featuring prominent historians including Max Hastings and focussing on some of the biggest issues, including the Third Reich, the British Empire and…
This is not the first time I have read this short book and that’s probably because it is proving to be so useful to me in my understanding of how the tsarist police (the Okhrana)…
Last Monday was Donald Trump’s first day in office as President and he raced to issue a series of “executive orders”. One would imagine that these reflected his highest priorities as well as those of…