Why I wrote this book — and why this story matters. At first, this is not obvious. Spoiler alert: The August 1924 uprising in Georgia did not succeed in overthrowing Soviet rule. It took another…
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It may sound hard to believe today, but there was a time when a lot of people really liked Israel. Large groups of young Europeans, mostly from the Nordic countries, would come over to the…
This appeared in Historia today — my 4th article for the online magazine of the Historical Writers Association (HWA): https://historiamag.com/serendipity-historians-weapon/
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…
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…
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…
Alma Katsu writes horror as well as espionage thrillers, and this one started with a really good premise: imagine if the Nazis with their “Werwolf” resistance movement at the end of the Second World War…
The final volume of the novella that began with The Spy Who Vanished, this is the weakest of the three. It’s much more of a shoot-em-up, with an unsatisfying ending, in my view.
This novella (or short story) is the sequel to The Spy Who Vanished about a “Russian James Bond”. Not as good as the first, but still well-written and engaging.