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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

First of all, that’s a great title for a spy thriller. But “Red Widow” is not a great spy thriller. Having spent many hours reading it, I don’t see the point of the story. Not…Read more…

I read best-selling author Griffiths’ latest novel, which involved time travel, and in the end I wasn’t impressed. But I have friends who are really hooked on her crime fiction starring Dr Ruth Galloway, an…Read more…

Elly Griffiths is the author of two very successful series of novels, knocking off dozens of titles. She apparently has a huge fanbase. This book promises the be the first of a series featuring Ali…Read more…

“Both history and psychoanalysis are sciences of memory, both are professionally committed to skepticism, both trace causes in the past, both seek to penetrate behind pioues professions and subtle evasions.” So concludes historian Peter Gay…Read more…

This attractive, well-illustrated short biography of Stalin is part of a new series featuring prominent historians including Max Hastings and focussing on some of the biggest issues, including the Third Reich, the British Empire and…Read more…

This is not the first time I have read this short book and that’s probably because it is proving to be so useful to me in my understanding of how the tsarist police (the Okhrana)…Read more…

This is a surprisingly interesting book. In just 143 pages (including extensive footnotes), the author examines many aspects of the Soviet dictator’s life through the prism of Freudian psychoanalysis. And many of his conclusions are…Read more…

No, he didn’t. The author of this short book, a former Bolshevik, apparently met Stalin briefly before the 1917 revolution, and says that the man didn’t make much of an impression. The remaining 90% of…Read more…

This is how history books used to look: no index, no footnotes, no bibliography. Life for historians was easier in 1940. Eugene Lyons, a journalist, was the first Western newspaperman to interview Josef Stalin in…Read more…

Dr Michael Mosley, who sadly died last year, was one of the great communicators about science and medicine. His radio shows and podcasts taught millions of us about things we could do to improve our…Read more…

If you’re looking for a book about Grateful Dead fans, this is not it. But if you want to continue following the increasingly strange adventures of the female serial killer Rhiannon Lewis, this is book…Read more…

A pregnant woman, her boyfriend in prison accused of murder, and on the run from police and nosy journalists — well, that’s one way to describe this delightful book. The other way is — a…Read more…