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
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.
Little of this correspondence is unknown. Published collections of documents from the 1950s have included many of the letters, if incomplete or doctored in some way. They have long been in the public domain in the sense that researchers could go to the Franklin D Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park,
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
Twitter Feed
Don't ask about the dress code, don't talk about your spouse too much, flirt with everyone
Andrew Martin on the rules, pleasures and pitfalls of living in Paris
Andrew Martin - Bobos versus Beaufs
Andrew Martin: Bobos versus Beaufs - Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century by Simon Kuper
literaryreview.co.uk
for the latest edition of @Lit_Review I worked on some excellent pieces – @MortenHoiJensen on Kafka
@ellafox_m on @mimpathy (Honor Levy)
@profrhodrilewis on Shakespeare novels
@edcumming on Kaliane Bradley
@zoeguttenplan on @NationalTheatre's Dickens show
wrote about MY FIRST BOOK (@GrantaBooks) for @Lit_Review, a book that I think makes difficult things look very easy: