Sheila Fitzpatrick

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'The Party: The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning' by Stuart Macintyre

April 2022, no. 441 • 23 March 2022

Stuart Macintyre was in a league of his own as a historian of communism. That’s not just a comment on his status as a historian of the Communist Party of Australia, whose first volume, The Reds (1999), took the party from its origins in 1920 to brief illegality at the beginning of World War II, and whose second, The Party, covering the period from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s, now appears p ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'The Summer of Theory: History of a rebellion, 1960–1990' by Philipp Felsch translated by Tony Crawford

March 2022, no. 440 • 20 February 2022

‘Theory of what?’ is the obvious lay response to Philipp Felsch’s title. But for those in the know, it goes without saying that he is talking about Theory with a capital T. That strange hybrid of philosophy, ethnology, and literary criticism cast its spell over participants in the student movement in Germany from the mid-1960s and in Paris after 1968. In the 1980s and 1990s, it reached the h ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet home front during World War II' by Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer

September 2021, no. 435 • 19 August 2021

When I was a graduate student in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, Russian friends used to talk a lot about World War II. Their stories were of hardship and suffering stoically borne by the population and finally vindicated by victory in 1945. This was not dissimilar from what was published in the Soviet press on the subject, but without the press’s obligatory references to the wise leadership ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'The Last Million: Europe’s displaced persons from World War to Cold War' by David Nasaw

January–February 2021, no. 428 • 16 December 2020

This is a book in the expansive American tradition of long, well-researched historical works on political topics with broad appeal, written in an accessible style for a popular audience. David Nasaw has not previously worked on displaced persons, but he is the author of several big biographies, most recently of political patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy. If you are interested in displaced persons beca ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'Traitors and Spies: Espionage and corruption in high places in Australia, 1901–50' by John Fahey

October 2020, no. 425 • 24 September 2020

I am a great fan of archives, and so is John Fahey, a former officer of an Australian intelligence service (the Defence Signals Directorate) turned historian. His previous book, Australia’s First Spies (2018), covered the same time period (1901–50) but focused on the good guys (our spies) rather than the bad ones (their spies). His itemised list of Australian, British, and US archival files co ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'The Ratline: Love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi fugitive' by Philippe Sands

June–July 2020, no. 422 • 26 May 2020

Hunting Nazis is an almost guaranteed reading pleasure – the joy of the chase, plus the moral uplift of being on the side of virtue. I started Philippe Sands’s book with a sense both of anticipation and déjà vu. A respected British international human rights lawyer with the proven ability to tell a story, Sands should be giving us a superior version of a familiar product. Many readers will r ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl guide to the future' by Kate Brown

October 2019, no. 415 • 23 September 2019

This is a very disturbing book. It’s not just the Chernobyl story, but also Kate Brown’s broader story about the worldwide but inadequately studied impact on public health of lifetime exposure to ‘chronic doses of man-made radiation from medical procedures, nuclear reactors and their accidents, and atomic bombs and their fall-out’. But let’s take Chernobyl first. Cover-up is a big part ... (read more)

Ives Westlake Debussy (Australian String Quartet)

ABR Arts • 09 September 2019

Nigel Westlake’s new quartet, Sacred Sky, commissioned by the Australian String Quartet, had its première before an enthusiastic audience at Sydney’s Recital Hall on 4 September 2019. Westlake wrote it in honour of his sister, the artist Kate Westlake, who died of pancreatic cancer in January 2018. He is not the first composer to write a quartet on a sibling’s death: Felix Mendelssohn did t ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s wartime correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt' edited by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov

April 2019, no. 410 • 25 March 2019

Joseph Stalin wanted this wartime correspondence published, and one can see why: he comes off best. As the authors comment, ‘the transcript of the Big Three meetings demonstrates Stalin’s careful mastery of the issues and his superior skill as a diplomatist, regularly keeping his silence but then speaking out in a terse and timely manner at key moments’. He is the one with his eye on the bal ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'A Spy Named Orphan: The enigma of Donald Maclean' by Roland Philipps

October 2018, no. 405 • 24 September 2018

Who doesn’t like to read about the Cambridge spies? Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Kim Philby were all students at Cambridge in the early 1930s when they were converted to communism and later recruited as Soviet spies. The Cambridge Four did decades of sterling work for the Soviets. Having risen to senior positions in the British Foreign Office (Maclean and Burgess), the British ... (read more)