Exiting the EU on Siegfried Sassoon’s time machine
Until today, Britain has been a member of the European Union for almost 47 years. Only people in their mid-fifties can have accurate memories of British life before accession to … Continue reading
Waiting for dawn
Tibor Szamuely sounded like a pessimist, and with good reason. Years after his release from the Gulag, he wrote a compelling book, The Russian Tradition, whose central argument is that … Continue reading
James Bond’s Russia question
James Bond is faced with a unique Russia question in Ian Fleming’s fifth 007 novel, From Russia With Love, published in 1957. Does Tatyana Romanova really want to defect from … Continue reading
Roy Jenkins in Moscow: a Brexit story
Seeking solace from Brexit, one could turn to the life of Roy Jenkins (1920-2003). As Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jenkins was among the most distinguished Labour politicians … Continue reading
Brexit: the view from the Soviet Union
On March 17 1991, the people of the Soviet Union voted in a referendum to resolve the greatest question of the time: should the USSR remain a single country, composed … Continue reading
The Nazi-Soviet pact: a moral problem
‘Historians often dislike what happened or wish that it had happened differently,’ wrote AJP Taylor, the great British historian-provocateur of the last century. He concluded: ‘There is nothing they can … Continue reading
The sleepwalkers
Would you trust a historian to get it right about Ukraine? After all, historians often get lost on the path of current events and fail to make predictions. They disagree confusingly with … Continue reading
