Review: Stalin’s Great Secret, by Isaac Don Levine
I don’t think I’ll be giving anything away by saying what the secret was: Stalin was an agent of the tsarist police, the Okhrana, from 1906 until 1912. Isaac Don Levine, who wrote the first…
Book reviews
Review: Eyewitness to History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century by Isaac Don Levine
I first came across Isaac Don Levine while researching the question of whether Stalin had been an agent of the tsarist police — an Okhrana mole inside the Bolshevik Party. Levine published a letter claiming…
Review: The Vanishing Futurist, by Charlotte Hobson
Charlotte Hobson has written a book that touches on two subjects that interest me enormously: the Russian Revolution and time travel. Without giving away too much of the plot — and there is a central…
Review: John Medhurst, No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st Century Left
John Medhurst’s new book is essential reading for anyone who (a) thinks of themselves as being progressive or on the left or (b) has something positive to say about Lenin or Trotsky. Actually, (b) is…
Review: Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
Timothy Snyder is an internationally-recognised expert on tyranny. His previous books have included studies of both right-wing and left-wing tyrannical regimes, focussing on Stalinism and Nazism. So when he writes a book that is, at…
The autobiography of Joseph Stalin: A novel – by Richard Lourie
In his bestselling book “Archangel”, Robert Harris creates an entire modern political thriller around Stalin’s great secret — which is revealed only in the second half of the book. And that incredible secret turns out…
The silent war – by Frank Falla
I’ve just come back from a week-long holiday in the Channel Islands, spending time on both Guernsey and Sark. In addition to the rural quiet, spectacular scenery and delicious local food, one attraction for me…
Red Gold – by Alan Furst
Alan Furst is routinely hailed as possibly the greatest living writer of traditional espionage fiction. He sets his books in exotic times and places — this one, for example, recounts stories of the French resistance…
God is Not Great – by Christopher Hitchens
If you had asked me a week ago what I thought of this book, I’d have answered — “It’s much more readable than Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. That’s not what I think now. Writing…
The Degaev Affair – by Richard Pipes
For some time now I have been a student of the decades long secret war between Russian revolutionaries and the tsarist police. (Attentive readers of this website will be aware that my research culminated a…