Sheila Fitzpatrick’s most recent books include On Stalin’s Team: The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics (2015) and White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia (2020). The Shortest History of the Soviet Union will be published early in 2022. She is a professor at Australian Catholic University.

When did you first write for ABR?

In September 2013, six months after returning to Australia after forty-eight years away, mainly in the United States, I wrote a piece for ABR on being a returning expatriate. Actually, this wasn’t my first piece for the journal (that was a review of a biography of Ryszard Kapuściński seven months earlier), but it was a piece that had particular importance for me. Rereading it recently, I was struck both by the conversational tone, as if I already thought ABR readers were my friends, and by the underlying seriousness of the effort to explain myself. I didn’t write like that for American publications.

What makes a fine critic?

Probably style and personality, in addition to knowledge. The London Review of Books, the other journal I regularly write for, gives you more or less unlimited space but wants not only a critique of the book under review but also an interesting, perhaps personally inflected, essay on the topic. ‘Can’t you take it somewhere?’ they asked me once when I said the book they had offered me was too slight. But that approach only works if you have 3,000 words to play with.