Stalin

On June 22, 1941, the German army invaded the Soviet Union. Over the next four months, the Wehrmacht blasted through the Soviet defenses, taking millions prisoner and destroying thousands of tanks. By early December, German scouts were purportedly within site of the Kremlin. Even though the Wehrmacht was forced back from the gates of Moscow by the Red Army, the renewed German offensive in spring 1942 threatened to deliver the coup de grâce to the Soviet Union. That it didn’t was due to an unlikely alliance between British prime minister Winston Churchill, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple of agents to spy out ancient Jericho. There they were sheltered by the madam of the local brothel. All three are heroes in Israel today. Generals and politicians have always needed secret information to track and outmanoeuvre their foreign and domestic enemies. So they place spies, suborn traitors, eavesdrop, decipher other people’s messages, subvert their governments, assassinate their servants and sabotage their property. The technology has changed massively over the centuries; the aims and the basic methods have not.

‘Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect… Reading is love in action.’ Those are the words of the bestselling author Matt Haig and though I wouldn’t put it quite like that, I too feel that there is something inherently good about reading. Daniel Kalder has no such illusions. His latest book Dictator Literature (published in the US as The Infernal Library) looks at the dark side of the written word. It’s a study of what the great and not so great dictators of modern times read and wrote. In lesser hands this would be a romp (romp isn’t quite the right word, is it?) through Mein Kampf, Lenin’s What is to be Done? and Mao’s Little Red Book, but Kalder is nothing if not thorough.