Judith Vidal-Hall
Last of the Stalinists
Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania
By Blendi Fevziu (Translated by Majlinda Nishku)
I B Tauris 300pp £25
Travel writers are tipping Albania as the next tourist hotspot, but what do we know of this ancient country? There is ‘luxury and inconvenience on the one hand, liberty, hard living, and filth on the other … Shut out … by iron walls of mountain, surrounded by the sternest features of savage scenery, rock and chasm, precipice and torrent, a more fearful prospect, and more chilling to the very blood, I never beheld.’
So Edward Lear described what at the time was an unknown and mysterious country in his Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania (1851). Edward Gibbon, half a century earlier, called it ‘a country within sight of Italy, which is less known than the interior of America’. These
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The Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky, who died yesterday, reviewed many books on Russia & spying for our pages. As he lived under threat of assassination, books had to be sent to him under ever-changing pseudonyms. Here are a selection of his pieces:
Literary Review - For People Who Devour Books
Book reviews by Oleg Gordievsky
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The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945 has long been regarded as a historical watershed – but did it mark the start of a new era or the culmination of longer-term trends?
Philip Snow examines the question.
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