Richard Overy
A Curious Correspondence
My Dear Mr Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph V Stalin
By Susan Butler (ed), Foreward by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Yale University Press 361pp £17.50 order from our bookshop
Neither Stalin nor Roosevelt could have had any idea early in 1941 that they would become distant pen pals by the year’s end. Eventually they wrote more than three hundred messages between them, the fruit of a collaboration forged from the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor almost six months later which made the two leaders into involuntary allies.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me