This is how history should be written. Roger Moorhouse has taken a subject rarely covered in detail despite its obvious importance and done a very thorough job of it. He begins the book by pointing…Read more…

The Kurds currently under attack by Turkish forces “didn’t help us in the second world war, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example,” said US president Donald Trump this week. “They mention…Read more…

Five years ago, the Kurdish enclave of Kobane in Northern Syria was besieged by Islamic State fighters, who then seemed to be on an unstoppable march through Iraq and Syria, with cities and towns…Read more…

Robert Harris often has the very best ideas for his books, but sometimes the book itself is a real let-down. The Second Sleep is an example of this. First of all, his good idea — the big reveal…Read more…

In the 1960’s there was a thriller called The President’s Plane is Missing by Robert J. Serling, the older brother of Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame. As I remember it, the book…Read more…

My article about the rebellion of Georgian soldiers on the Dutch island of Texel in April-May 1945 — often described as the final battle of the second world war in Europe — has appeared…Read more…

A German couple recently went on holiday in the Austrian Alps, and found a four-star hotel in the village of Gerlos.  To their shock, in the lobby were two framed photographs of men in World War…Read more…

This was a surprising book. I expected an account of the numerous small-scale attempts by individuals and tiny groups of decent Germans to oppose the Nazi regime, such as the famous White Rose group….Read more…

‘Joe’ in this case is slang for a secret agent. This book, the sixth and latest (but not last) of the series is set in Slough House, the place where the British secret service discards…Read more…

OK, I’ve said this before and I have to say it again: plot is not Mick Herron’s greatest strength. In this book, the fifth in the Slough House series, a bunch of terrorists blow up some…Read more…

On October 30, 1972 a little-known author named Arthur Tobier published a book entitled How McGovern Won the Presidency and Why the Polls Were Wrong. The New York Times described the book as “perhaps…Read more…

Let me start by saying that having now read the first four books in the Jackson Lamb/Slough House series, I think we can pretty well give up on any expectation that the plots are going to get any…Read more…

The name of Roman Malinovsky is little remembered today, but this was not the case a bit more than a century ago. Malinovsky was one of the most important figures in the Bolshevik Party in the years…Read more…

The third volume in Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series of thrillers continues to be as good as promised. Each of the books sees one or more members of his ‘slow horses’ team leave…Read more…

The second of Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb thrillers is as good as the first. But … you have to love the characters. Perhaps ‘love’ is the wrong way of putting it. They are,…Read more…

To be honest, I never heard of Mick Herron — but having just read a review of the sixth book in the series, I thought I’d give it a go. And I’m hooked. Herron has been compared to…Read more…

I read this graphic novel with great hope as it was based on a great idea. Imagine if Kal-El, son of Krypton, had landed not in Smallville in the American midwest, but on a collective farm in the…Read more…

My first article in Esperanto – for the website uea.facila.org, which is aimed at people learning the language (hence the short texts in simple Esperanto). I’ll bet that most people…Read more…

Presentation to Ideas for Freeedom, London, 22 June 2019 What are the prospects for the Israeli Left today? My short answer is: bleak. In Israel’s first elections following independence in…Read more…

The following is the text of my presentation to the international seminar held in Oslo this week by the Arthur Svensson foundation. First of all, I want to thank the Svensson foundation for the…Read more…