Richard Overy
Twentieth Century Monsters
Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe
By Robert Gellately
Jonathan Cape 720pp £25 order from our bookshop
Are we not almost Stalined and Hitlered out? This reviewer is certainly not the best person to argue the case! Yet over the past few years both dictators have been given the kind of attention usually reserved for pop idols and footballers. As I write, Hitler’s collection of 78s has just been discovered and is front page news (always hard to believe that he could listen to a Mozart or Beethoven violin sonata like the rest of us and still order the mass liquidation of the Jews). Richard Evans, Ian Kershaw, Robert Service, Geoffrey Roberts and Simon Sebag Montefiore have produced monuments to the two dictators that are as up-to-date, informed and fluent as you could wish.
Robert Gellately knows this and he has chosen to give his account a novel twist. To the conventional duo he has added Lenin. He confesses that colleagues were hesitant when he told them he had decided to do it because Lenin has often been seen as the nice guy to
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
Wrote some nice things and some less nice things about Edward St Aubyn for @Lit_Review. Something for everyone https://literaryreview.co.uk/sociable-scientists
'Heaven for him was being caressed by duchesses in gilded salons and entertaining royalty in his palatial mansion ... where he showed off his gemmed gewgaws and laced the cocktails with Benzedrine.'
Piers Brendon on the diaries of Chips Channon (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/he-played-sardines-with-the-aga-khan
'Like so many of Ishiguro’s human narrators ... Klara contains within herself divisions and contradictions, pockets of knowledge that she isn’t able to synthesise fully.'
@infomodernist reviews 'Klara and the Sun'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/our-virtual-friend