I’m probably wrong about this, but I think the trend of writing police procedurals set in totalitarian societies started with Martin Cruz Smith, whose Gorky Park was published back in 1981. Since then there have…

This short book is a brilliant book. Many of the books I read are quite predictable, and that is one of the reasons why I read them. If I read a thriller or crime fiction,…

On page 74 of this book, a character is described as “a Service legend, in her way. Not a bona fide legend like your Jackson Lambs – the plural uncalled for, because there was only…

One reviewer described this book as “‘Inglorious Basterds’ but much better”. I don’t buy that at all. This is not, in any sense, based upon or linked to Tarantino’s brilliant film. Instead, it’s the true…

I am of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it hasn’t stood the test of time. Kautsky’s predictions from 1918 about what was going to happen next in Soviet Russia turned out…

This is a long, detailed and quite interesting account of the first years of Germany following the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945. But it is not comprehensive. There are many topics that Jähner has…

This is one the great works of anti-Stalinist literature. It is an attempt by the ex-Communist Koestler to imagine how Soviet interrogators squeezed confessions out of men like Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin — men who…

Mark Billingham, who is probably Britain’s finest living crime writer, has been knocking off a book a year, sometimes starring his main protagonist Tom Thorne, but sometimes with Thorne only having a walk-on part. In…

This short book is a transcript of a long-forgotten meeting that took place in Berlin’s Reichstag in early April 1922. At the initiative the Austrian Social Democrats and their colleagues in what came to be…

The only problem with the new Slough House title by Mick Herron is that now we have to wait a whole year for the next book in the series.