Communism
I’d rather live under communism than the tyranny of social media
At the time it felt like a century, but it was only 12 years. I began this column in 1977…
How does today’s world compare with Orwell’s nightmare vision?
Apart from a passionate relationship with the common toad, what do George Orwell and David Attenborough have in common? H.G.…
How to fight Bolshevism
From 10 May 1919: The heart of the country is always for moderation. Nothing could show this more plainly than…
How Eric Hobsbawm remained a lifelong communist — despite the ‘unpleasant data’
Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts…
Ian Kershaw recounts Europe’s recovery from WWII – have the good times run their course?
When I reviewed the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s wrist-breaking history of the last 100 years of Europe, To…
No apology is ever enough for the digital mob
Promoting physical fitness, the left has developed a bracing set of competitive callisthenics. Participants vie over who can complete a…
Teen Vogue and the rebirth of Radical Chic
Are we witnessing the rebirth of Radical Chic? That was the term coined by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay…
Marxism didn’t die. It’s alive and well and living among us
I remember the autumn day in 1990 when they came to cart away the large hammer and sickle outside my…
Enduring life under Chairman Mao
Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive…
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…
