From Siberia With Love by Geoffrey Elliott, Methuen, 2004, 300pp.

Perhaps because it is a lost civilisation, the Russian empire seems to exert an almost magnetic attraction on the children and grandchildren of the people who left. In recent years a notable number have traced their families back to Polish villages or Tsarist palaces, pieced together the histories of those places using family memoirs and old photographs, and written books which describe what, if anything, still remains of their ancestors’ past. Read on »

The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science

by Vadim Birstein

Basic Books, 2008, pp. 512

In 1978 Bulgarian agents tried to murder Georgi Markov – a Bulgarian dissident then living in London – no fewer than three times. Once, they touched him “accidentally” with poisoned skin cream, designed to cause a heart attack within 48 hours. When that failed, they tried to slip chemicals into his drink. Finally, they came up with an unorthodox but ultimately succesful plan. Read on »

Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March, by Adam Zamoyski, HarperCollins, 644 pp.

Certain historical events become so covered in myth and significance, so overlaid with patriotism and emotion, that over time many people forget what really happened and why. Napoleon’s fatal 1812 march on Moscow is one such event. Read on »

Moscow 1812  – Napoleon’s Fatal March by Adam Zamoyski, Harper Collins, 2004, 672pp.

Certain historical events become so covered in myth and significance, so overlaid with patriotism and emotion, that over time many people forget what really happened and why. Napoleon’s fatal 1812 march on Moscow is one such event. Read on »

My Life by Bill Clinton, Vintage Books, 2005, 969pp.

It is rare, in a conventional book review, for the reviewer to begin by describing her purchase of the book in question, but in this case it really is part of the story. For I bought My Life, Bill Clinton’s memoir, in the very early hours of the morning at a Washington bookshop which had announced it would put the book on sale at the stroke of midnight, when the embargo ended. Read on »

Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House by Sally Beddell Smith, Ballantine Books, 2006, 686pp.

A week after her husband’s assassination in November, 1963, Jackie Kennedy gave an interview to the writer Theodore White. Passionately declaring that she didn’t want John F. Kennedy immortalised by “bitter” journalists who didn’t appreciate him, she told White that she had come up with her own metaphor for his presidency. She had chosen it, she said, from a line in a Broadway show song that her husband had loved: “Don’t let it be forgot that once there was a spot, from one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.” Read on »

The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: Was Hitler’s Favorite Actress a Russian Spy? by Antony Beevor,
Viking, 2004, 300pp.

At the beginning of May, in 1919, a group of travelling performers from the Moscow Art Theatre set out on a tour of the provinces. The group’s director was the legendary Konstantin Stanislavsky; among its performers was the equally legendary actress wife of the late Anton Chekhov. Unfortunately, the tour was not a success. Although the group was billeted in an abandoned hotel in Kharkov which “still retained an air of pre-revolutionary elegance”, the city’s ambience was somewhat lacking. “Nobody had told them that the civil war had erupted again,” writes Antony Beevor in his description of this ill-fated trip. Within days, the troupe found itself cut off from Moscow, on the wrong side – the White side – of the front line in the bloody Russian civil war. Read on »

 Moscow Memoirs by Emma Gerstein (translated by John Crowfoot), Harvill, 2004, 482pp.

Without a doubt, Moscow Memoirs is an extraordinary book, one of those literary memoirs that comes along once a decade. Emma Gerstein, in her nineties when she published it, has shed completely new light on some of the most important poets and writers of the 20th century, providing previously unknown biographical details, some of which will lead to new interpretations of their work. Read on »

Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall
by Andrew Meier, W W Norton & Co Inc, 2005, 516pp.

Anyone who has lived for any length of time in Russia during the past decade will instantly understand why Andrew Meier wrote this book. Meier, who worked in Moscow for Time magazine from 1996 until 2001, probably spent most of his time there doing what most other reporters do: covering news, chasing the things that editors back home consider important, and mentally storing up, for future use, all of the strange scenes, surreal situations and bizarre personalities that reporters rarely manage to squeeze into their stories about the former Soviet Union. Read on »

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To anyone who ever tried to understand why the political left has played such a large role in American intellectual life, or why the term “anti-communist” ever became an insult, or why so many allegedly clear-thinking people feared Joe McCarthy more than Josef Stalin, Ann Coulter’s new book will certainly prove thought-provoking. Read on »