Donald Rayfield
The Past Imprisoned
So many British and American historians write books (many not just good, but seminal) about twentieth-century Russia that readers must assume that these historians have fed on a cornucopia of information and are illuminated by blinding rays of insight. Certainly, from 1917 to 1989 Soviet publications gave few truthful statistics or accounts of events; archival access was restricted to a few Soviet citizens who would be silent about what they saw. The flood of memoirs, minutes of meetings, case files, etc that burst out in the early 1990s was intoxicating but also indigestible.
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'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2