Communism
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…
The bane of Albania
In his final public appearance, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha addressed a Tirana crowd to commemorate the capital’s liberation from…
Death 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
A topsy-turvy world
‘A crane fell on top of me in Kladno in 1952, after which my writing got better,’ Bohumil Hrabal (who…
Communism kills
We need a museum to help us remember that
Left without pleasures
No golf, no bridge, a tortured relationship with champagne… lefties deserve your sympathy, not your scorn
Sixty years on
The book of the year has long been a favoured genre in popular history, and is a commonplace today. While…
A pitiful wreck
When I look at the black-and-white photograph of Julian Barnes on the flap of his latest book, the voice of…
Class of ’83
No one remembers this now but there really was a period, not so long ago, when the Eighties were universally…
Of hearts and heads
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…
The continent in crisis
Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and…
Liberating Marianne
Patrick Marnham unravels some of the powerful, often conflicting myths surrounding the French Resistance
Free markets and dumb luck
The greatest mistake made by conservatism was its overly close relationship with neo-classical economics. This was a marriage of convenience:…
The real theatre of war
The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia…
Deep in the heart of darkness
For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with.…
Travels in Nowhere Land
Transnistria is not an area well-served by travel literature or, really, literature of any kind. The insubstantial-seeming post-Soviet sandwich-filling between…
Mao’s violent disciple
Much has been written about Deng Xiao-ping (1904–1997), most recently by Ezra Vogel in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of…
Beautiful and damned
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
How to survive totalitarianism
When this extraordinary book was about to come out in French four years ago its author was told by his…
Sacred hunger
Atheists are blind to a fundamental human need
Lest we forget
Twenty-five years ago, Rowena Xiaoqing He, then a schoolgirl, was participating in the Tiananmen-supporting demonstrations in Canton. Far from the…
Old school ties
Robert Gore-Langton talks to Julian Mitchell about the painful roots of his hit play Another Country
Reds under the beds
Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in…
