Communism
Doris Lessing: from champion of free love to frump with a bun
‘I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can.’ Lara Feigel begins her thoughtful book…
The Cambridge spy ring and the myth of an upper-class cover up
It has become fashionable since the fall of the Soviet Union to diagnose communist fellow travelling as a form of…
The mischief of Bolshevism
From ‘The Bolshevik negotiations with Germany’, 19 January 1918: We think that the fact is fairly emerging from the negotiations…
Tales out of school
In 1952, the five-year-old Michael Rosen and his brother were taken on holiday along the Thames by their communist parents.…
Pole position
Did you know that they used to make the Fiat 126 in the Eastern bloc? They did, apparently. There was…
Armageddon averted
From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the…
Enver Hoxha: Stalin’s devilish disciple
In his final public appearance, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha addressed a Tirana crowd to commemorate the capital’s liberation from…
Meet the fans who risk death for heavy metal
We in the West may snigger at heavy metal, but in some parts of the world its practitioners face the death penalty. Karen Yossman reports
The very Czech (and very funny) brilliance of Bohumil Hrabal
‘A crane fell on top of me in Kladno in 1952, after which my writing got better,’ Bohumil Hrabal (who…
Britain needs a museum of communist terror
We need a museum to help us remember that
No golf, no bridge, scared of champagne – it’s tough being a leftie
No golf, no bridge, a tortured relationship with champagne… lefties deserve your sympathy, not your scorn
1956: the year of living dangerously
The book of the year has long been a favoured genre in popular history, and is a commonplace today. While…
The tortured genius of Shostakovich
When I look at the black-and-white photograph of Julian Barnes on the flap of his latest book, the voice of…
The integrity and chain-smoking of these East German Commies is rather attractive
No one remembers this now but there really was a period, not so long ago, when the Eighties were universally…
What happened to British communism?
Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor,…
James Klugmann and Guy Burgess: the wasted lives of spies
Geoff Andrews’s ‘Shadow Man’, James Klugmann, was the talent-spotter, recruiter and mentor of the Cambridge spy ring. From 1962, aged…
What drove Europe into two world wars?
Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and…
The facts behind France’s most potent modern myth
Patrick Marnham unravels some of the powerful, often conflicting myths surrounding the French Resistance
The real power of free markets: not efficiency, but innovation and dumb luck
The greatest mistake made by conservatism was its overly close relationship with neo-classical economics. This was a marriage of convenience:…
Hirohito, MacArthur and other villains
The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia…
Both Belgium and the United States should be called to account for the death of Patrice Lumumba
For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with.…
Transnistria: a breakaway republic of a breakaway republic
Transnistria is not an area well-served by travel literature or, really, literature of any kind. The insubstantial-seeming post-Soviet sandwich-filling between…
Deng Xiaoping: following in Mao’s footsteps
Much has been written about Deng Xiao-ping (1904–1997), most recently by Ezra Vogel in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of…
Germans see the best of their soul in Weimar. Everyone else, on the other hand..
For centuries hailed as the home of poetry, music and liberalism, Weimar was ruthlessly exploited by the Nazis and later served as a showcase for communism, says Philip Hensher
A Pole’s view of the Czechs. Who cares? You will
When this extraordinary book was about to come out in French four years ago its author was told by his…
