There was a time, as Sean McMeekin reminds us, when public commentators were in near total-consensus. Communism had been tossed aside in eastern Europe in 1989. Two years later it met the same fate in the Soviet Union. In China the communist leadership was by then pursuing the benefits of capitalist economics. Governments actually committed to communism remained in only a few countries, such as Cuba and North Korea, and it seemed that the wheel of global history had turned irreversibly against it.

To Overthrow the World accounts for the origins of communism by going back to Adam and Eve in Genesis and Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Where the book really gets going, however, is in the chapters on the leading communist states, the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. The author’s technique relies heavily on sketches of the wielders of supreme power. Mistakes are commendably few – having done a world history of communism a couple of decades ago, I know how testing a topic he has chosen. (Quibble: Trotsky wasn’t truly a Menshevik but an ally of the Mensheviks before 1914 after becoming exasperated by Lenin’s factionalist excesses.) The pen portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev are sharp and succinct, and the narrative surges across the bloodied sands of Soviet history.

It is not a dispassionate account. McMeekin rarely fails to curl the lip when offering his judgements. Innuendo often replaces direct proof. Gorbachev, he hints, may have been complicit with the organisers of the August 1991 coup. Did he not meet the conspirator Oleg Baklanov on 18 and 21 August?