Adam Zamoyski

‘The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,’ Hitler remarked on the eve of invading Poland in September 1939. Nobody believed his claim that Germany was acting in self-defence; but they did believe his carefully crafted propaganda to the effect that the Poles were so dumb they used cavalry armed with lances against tanks. In this timely and authoritative book, Roger Moorhouse dispels this and other myths concocted by German and Soviet propaganda. He has trawled through an impressive quantity of unpublished Polish and German sources, as well as a wealth of eyewitness testimonies from both sides, to produce a balanced account of this much neglected yet important episode of the second world war which is both harrowing and inspiring.

This is an entirely pointless but curiously engaging and even tantalising book. A youthful love affair in Montreal with a girl of Latvian descent plants the word ‘Courland’ in the author’s mind. He finds it mellifluous and somehow magical. The girl’s beauty and otherworldliness add a sense of mystery. An Alsatian cousin whose father, drafted into the Wehrmacht, had been killed there in 1945, prompts darker reflection. The discovery that a workmate at the Paris paper he works for is a descendant of the legendary Duchess of Dino, granddaughter of the last of the Dukes of Courland, introduces an intriguing note of nostalgia for a lost elegance.

I am no great fan of spy thrillers and positively allergic to conspiracy theories, but I found this book difficult to put down. In an earlier study, Edward Lucas examined Russia’s use of energy as a weapon against the EU and the Atlantic alliance. In this one, he dives below the surface into the murky waters of the country’s security apparatus and demonstrates that, while it has shed the old KGB image, it remains as pervasive and just as menacing. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the battlelines were clear cut and so was the role of the Soviet Union’s defenders. At home, they silenced any criticism of the system. Abroad, they carried on an ideological struggle for dominance with the United States and its allies.

This is the story of a very unusual man. ‘Wilhelm von Habsburg,’ Timothy Snyder tells us, ‘wore the uniform of an Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian exile, the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and, every so often, a dress. He could handle a sabre, a pistol, a rudder, or a golf club; he handled women by necessity and men for pleasure. He spoke the Italian of his archduchess mother, the German of his archduke father, the English of his British royal friends, the Polish of the country his father wished to rule, and the Ukrainian of the land he wished to rule himself.

Until fairly recently, the name Thyssen-Bornemisza held generally positive associations — with vibrant German industrialism, responsible capitalism, pan-European cosmopolitanism, artistic connoisseurship and philanthropy, all tinged with a pleasant whiff of Hungarian nobility. Just how deeply erroneous these are revealed to have been is staggering. August Thyssen, who created the family fortune in the second half of the 19th century, was neither an inventive manufacturer, nor an adventurous entrepreneur, nor a creative capitalist. He made his money by marrying sensibly, associating with the right people and taking advantage of opportunities. He was a careful, thrifty, cost-cutting, cheese-paring and exploitative industrialist, more of a quartermaster than a captain of industry.

Norman Davies is always at his best challenging received ideas and inherited perceptions, and the areas covered by these essays provide him with rich hunting-grounds for both. The title is misleading in that he ranges around Australia, California and Siberia, not to mention the Middle East, as well as Europe, and takes swipes at prejudices held by the pundits of many nations and cultures. I have to confess a slight prejudice against compilations of essays and lectures. There is always an element of unevenness in quality, a lack of unity and a certain amount of repetition. Ideally, each piece should be read on its own, independently of and at least a few days apart from the others, not a luxury a reviewer can permit himself. Above all, lectures are best listened to, not read.

This is indeed a story of war, passion and loss. But those looking for a bittersweet tale of romantic Polish aristocrats stoically facing their doom at the hands of the Nazis and Soviets will get a great deal more than they bargained for. This is Gone with the Wind scripted for the Addams family. The sorry tale opens in 1914 with the author’s grandfather running out of the bedroom on his wedding night and shooting himself with a revolver. He survived, and whatever his problem may have been, it was eventually resolved: he produced a brace of children, to which his wife added an extramarital supernumerary. It might have been better if they had remained childless. Hushed-up adulterous affairs between close cousins had led to his marrying his aunt.

To anyone who enjoyed Fernand Braudel’s masterly work on the Mediterranean or Neal Ascher- son’s wonderful Black Sea, the idea of a book on the Baltic is an appealing one.

One of those little footnotes to history that has always intrigued me is that the Bolsheviks planned and carried out the October Revolution in the palace of the Tsar’s mistress. The idea of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and the rest of them strutting about the marble-clad halls and damask-swathed boudoirs of the great courtesan’s mansion in their cloth caps, smoking and plotting bloody mayhem, is grotesque but also somehow fitting when one considers the moral squalor and the shoddy grandeur of their political enterprise. I longed to know more about this Bolshevik Bethlehem. This book has done more than satisfy my curiosity. The story it tells is an extraordinary one in every way.

The Warsaw uprising of August 1944 was one of the most tragic episodes of the second world war, resulting in the destruction of the city and some 200,000 of its inhabitants. It is also one of the least well known. The fact that the Red Army had stood by while the city was pounded to rubble by the Germans meant that the subject was a touchy one in postwar communist Poland. And it was no less embarrassing to Poland’s wartime allies in the West, who had also failed to help. It was avoided by historians, as it aroused unease in those who liked to see the war as a straight- forward fight against the Nazi evil, and distaste in those with pro-Soviet sympathies.