I was just chatting away to Ionutz a security nurse in the local mental hospital and he’s Romanian. I passed through Bucharest a few years ago en route to Istanbul on a train journey traversing Eastern Europe. Romania seemed quite rural, poor and quite different to the Europe with which…
Under Nikita Khrushchev, the easing of oppression allowed Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” to emerge despite censorship. This poignant narrative reflects the grim reality of gulag life, showcasing a political prisoner’s struggle and survival amid harsh conditions, offering a lens into the human capacity for resilience and appreciation.
View More Review: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
There is irony in this tale as Bill Browder was following in his grandfather’s footsteps in some ways but was also radically poles apart. Browder’s grandfather had stood for Presidential election in the USA on a Communist ticket. Bill Browder was drawn to business possibilities behind the Iron Curtain and…
View More Review: Red Notice – How I Became Putin’s No.1 Enemy – by Bill Browder
As a committed sinophile, this recently written book seemed a necessity. As China continues its rise to being the most dominant national force economically on the planet, it is quite difficult to obtain meaningful and relevant and unbiased factual information about its thoughts and the thoughts of its governing Chinese…
View More Review: Hidden Hand – How The Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping The World – by Clive Hamilton & Mareike Ohlberg
The Stasi were the brutal secret police in the GDR (German Democratic Republic) or East Germany. After the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East and West Germany once again became reunited. Funder is an Australian journalist who, in this award-winning book,…
View More Review: Stasiland – Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall – by Anna Funder
They say that truth is often stranger than fiction and this book that I have given a 5 star rating reads very fluently and tells the real story of British secret service agents as they engage in the art of espionage across the globe. True heroes and heroines emerge as…
View More Review: The Art Of Betrayal – Life and Death in the British Secret Service – by Gordon Corera
The New Cold War by Edward Lucas My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book is a study of Russia in the post-communist era. It documents the rise of Vladimir Putin and identifies the ‘new cold war’ that envelopes Russia’s relations with the outside world. I found the book to…
View More Review: The New Cold War – by Edward Lucas