Do street protests matter? Many people in the UK are still stung by how gigantic demonstrations two decades ago could not stop Tony Blair from joining the US-led invasion of Iraq. And today in Israel,…Read more…
The one person Starmer should have sacked
In the course of Labour’s first year in office, Keir Starmer has been very energetic and effective in one particular area: he’s very good at getting rid of people who fall out of favour for…Read more…
Welcome to Europe
For many years, people in the U.K. could comfortably boast that unlike continental European countries, we didn’t have Nazis. We had a far Right, of course, but even that struggled to win seats in Parliament. …Read more…
Review: Lenin in Zurich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I first read this book nearly half a century ago, when it was published in English. At the time, I remember not liking it very much — and I had loved pretty much everything else…Read more…
Review: I Rediscover Russia, by Isaac Don Levine
Isaac Don Levine had a remarkable track record of writing breakthrough books about the twentieth century, routinely missing the main point. His 1917 book on the Russian Revolution failed to mention Lenin and the Bolsheviks….Read more…
Lenin in Zurich – 2025
A little more than a century ago, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya left their two-room apartment at Spiegelgasse 14 in Zurich, never to return. They travelled to Russia through Germany at the…Read more…
“Anti-Israel” does not equal “left-wing”
I was talking the other day to a young man who was patiently explaining to me that to be “left” is to be “anti-Israel”. There was no difference at all in his mind. And he…Read more…
Ninotchka
To mark my birthday, we invited several dozen friends to join us yesterday in watching the 1939 film classic “Ninotchka” starring Greta Garbo. We rented out a local cinema for the occasion. Here is what…Read more…
Review: The Battle of Britain: Myth and Reality, by Richard Overy
Richard Overy is a first-class historian and an excellent writer. He’s also an expert on the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Second World War, so this short book was full of promise. It lived…Read more…
Zohran Mamdani
If elected in November, Zohran Mamdani will be the third democratic socialist mayor of New York City in the last 35 years. His predecessors included David Dinkins, a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC)…Read more…
Review: What the Night Brings, by Mark Billingham
The publication of a new Mark Billingham novel is always a cause for celebration and this one is no different. Well, it is different, actually. It marks the return of Billingham’s iconic London police detective…Read more…
Review: The Story of My Life, by Father George Gapon
Many people with only a passing famililarity with Russian history will have heard about the revolution of 1905 — and about the massacre of unarmed workers by the Tsar’s troops in January of that year….Read more…
Dan Gallin, 1931 – 2025
Dan Gallin, the former general secretary of the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) passed away at his home in Geneva at the end of last month at the age of 94. He was to me,…Read more…
Review: Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, by James Bloodworth
From the very first page of this compelling book, you’re in the thick of it. James Bloodworth describes participating in a course to teach him how to pick up girls in London’s Leicester Square. That…Read more…
Review: In the Heart of the Fire, by Dean Koontz
I must be the last person on the planet to discover Dean Koontz, who has sold something like 450,000,000 books. (I’m not making that up.). This one is a novella, part of series about a,…Read more…
Review: Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life, by Timothy Ryback
There are a few things that Hitler and Stalin shared, despite the obvious differences. Both men began their lives deeply committed to their faith, and considered life as clergymen, before turning on the church. Both…Read more…
Review: Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, by Timothy Ryback
Writing history has one serious problem: how does an author maintain suspense when the outcome is known in advance? Timothy Ryback does this very successfully in Takeover where one can easily imagine another result in…Read more…
Review: Dissolution, by Nicholas Binge
What a strange book. It has elements of time travel, but it’s not really a time travel book. Much of it consists of an interrogation taking place we don’t know where in which the interrogator…Read more…
Review: Stalin, by Harold Shukman
This is one of a crop of very short biographies of Soviet dictator published in recent years. Here is what I loved about it: Harold Shukman is a well-known academic, an expert on Soviet history….Read more…
Israel has had enough of Netanyahu
Public opinion polls in Israel consistently show that Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government cannot win the next election. The parties of the centre and left are consistently polling higher than those of the right. And it’s…Read more…