Stalin
Communism kills
We need a museum to help us remember that
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…
Of hearts and heads
Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor,…
Between the woods and the water
Timothy Snyder traces Ukraine’s complex history from its classical heritage to the present day
Moving statues
Sculptural topplings provide an index of changing times, says Martin Gayford
General Anders to the rescue
Until Poland joined the EU in the 1990s, the biggest single influx of Poles into this country was in the…
Designing the swimming car, the Doodlebug and the Panzer tank was all in a day’s work for Ferdinand Porsche
The aggressive character of the famous German sports car, in a sort of sympathetic magic, often transfers itself to owner-drivers.…
Unreliable evidence
I hadn’t really thought much about pixels before, despite spending a large portion of my day looking at them. After…
What does it really mean to have a tyrannical father?
What was it like, asks Jay Nordlinger, to have Mao as your father, or Pol Pot, or Papa Doc? The…
Lady killer
‘Kiss me, Sergei! Kiss me hard! Kiss me until the icons fall and split!’ sings Katerina Ismailova, adulterous antiheroine of…
Dick at his trickiest
In the more than 40 years since Richard Nixon resigned as president — disgraced as much by his inveterate lying…
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…
The powers that were
Ivan Maisky was the Russian ambassador in London from 1932 to 1943, and his knowledge of London, and affection for…
The Spectator’s Notes
As someone who has rarely written a sentence in praise of the late Sir Edward Heath, I hope I can…
A master of miniatures
On YouTube there’s a brief dance video of a Viennese waltz so enchanting that not even Fred and Ginger in…
Futurist at a dead end
Why increase the number of suicides? Better to increase the output of ink! wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1926 in response…
The great defection deception
This is not quite another story about a man who never was. But it is about a man who certainly…
There will be blood
LBC likes to tell us it’s ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’, though in the case of weekday pre-lunch presenter James O’Brien you’ll…
Ten days in May
‘If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it.’ Bruno…
Escape into Moomin world
Tove Jansson’s father was a sculptor specialising in war memorials to the heroes of the White Guard of the Finnish…
Surviving the Soviets
Ismene Brown talks to the Russian super-couple Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin about ballet, opera and the KGB
Bribery and seduction
‘No, we must go our own way,’ said Lenin. The whole world knows him as Vladimir, while he was in…
The tyrant and the cloud-dweller
The banning of Dr Zhivago in the Soviet Union had unfortunate consequences for other fine 20th-century Russian novels, says Robert Chandler
How to survive totalitarianism
When this extraordinary book was about to come out in French four years ago its author was told by his…
