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Books

The second world war — according to Stalin’s ambassador to London

Ivan Maisky’s diaries contain sharp insights on Chamberlain, Churchill — and the ‘blind moles’ in the House of Lords who in 1938 still proclaimed Hitler Europe’s saviour

12 September 2015

9:00 AM

12 September 2015

9:00 AM

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s 1932—1943 edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky

Yale University Press, pp.632, £25, ISBN: 9780300180671

Ivan Maisky was the Russian ambassador in London from 1932 to 1943, and his knowledge of London, and affection for it, went back to his time there as a political exile from 1912 to 1917. Even after the multitude of books published on the subject, these diaries throw new light from a fresh angle on the lead-up to 1939, and the subsequent course of the war.

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