Reviews

Vladimir Putin’s penchant for assassinating his political enemies is nothing new for Russian rulers. His former employers, the KGB and, before that, the NKVD, were dab hands at it. Stalin’s order to murder Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico has plenty of parallels today giving this book con

In May 2009 a meeting of residents of flats in Saltwater Mansions in Margate included Caroline Lane, a resident in a ground floor flat there. The meeting was somewhat contentious because of a dispute around essential repairs. Caroline Lane resided alone, and she challenged her liability for payment.

The unsolved murder of Stevan Markovic, the Serbian bodyguard and associate of French film star Alain Delon, became an immense scandal in the Paris of 1968 engulfing the highest politicans in the land and highlighted Delon’s connections with gangsters. Rumours also abounded about orgies organ

In this true, but often scarcely-believable, story Neil Root explains as best can be done the personal history of Peter Rachman before the latter arrived in Britain. His mysterious background relies for the most part on Rachman’s own undocumented explanations.

Natalie Livingstone’s vivid retelling of the Nuremberg trials shifts the focus from the Nazi defendants to the remarkable women who witnessed, interpreted, chronicled and shaped the proceedings, revealing how their experiences illuminated the moral, political and human legacy of the twentieth

The ‘CIA book program’ during the Cold War aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire ideas of revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture. This was at a time when the Iron Curtain, forming a long and heavily guarded border, divided Europe. From New York headquarter

As a young journalist visiting Brezhnev’s sclerotic Soviet Union, I felt privileged to be shown around the huge state library in Leningrad, the second largest in the world, by one of the aged librarians who had actually worked there during the horrendous 872-day siege of the city, when the Naz

On Tuesday 4 May 1926, two million workers withdrew their labour in one of the great failures of industrial management. Politically, many thought events were indicative of something sinister to come, a rising similar to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

James Ramsay MacDonald moved from a very modest and unpromising background in Lossiemouth to London and became prime minister. Even with a substantial historiography, MacDonald, according to historian Walter Reid, remains a difficult person to interpret. Reid is generally sympathetic towards MacDona

The Care Home Swindler, the reader is told, purports to be, and is, the "gripping inside story" of a care home owner who took vast sums of money from his residents, with "an expose of the terrifying reality of what happens to the elderly behind closed doors". The care home owner, the reader is advis

The death of Elizabeth I in 1603 was the end of the Tudor dynasty and a long-unanswered question still remained: who was to succeed her? The answer had eluded English politicians, or at least those of them who initially took the long view. It came to pass, however, that the accession to the  En

The death of Adolf Hitler is said to be unique in the history of modern dictators. His death occurred amid imminent regime change. The absence of a successor government meant an absence of an administration with the ability, or inclination, to perform full funeral rites. There was no national period

Louise Heren reviews a new book on the headline-grabbing trial of Gayle Newland.

Without money laundering, it appears, few major crimes of acquisition would be worth the trouble. In the old days, in other words, shops, post offices and banks were robbed for their cash, and very possibly not very much of it given the effort and risks then required. The nature of successful top-en

Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès, was the first late modern politician in the West to emerge politically as a populist, an antisemite, and what might now be called a fascist militiaman. That unattractive curriculum vitae reflects the rise politically of Morès by incendiary rhet