Sheila Fitzpatrick
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Recent:
Back in the 1970s, when I went up to Katerina Clark’s place in Connecticut for the weekend, I was always a bit on my guard. Katerina was a wonderful and generous friend, but inquisitive. Being young, I had things in my personal life I wanted to hide. A silent tussle went on between us as she did her best to ferret them out (probably knowing from her other sources more or less what they were) and I stone-walled.
... (read more)The Red Hotel: The untold story of Stalin’s disinformation war by Alan Philps
The Shortest History of the Soviet Union by Sheila Fitzpatrick & Collapse by Vladislav M. Zubok
The Red Witch: A biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard by Nathan Hobby
The Party: The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning by Stuart Macintyre
The Summer of Theory: History of a rebellion, 1960–1990 by Philipp Felsch, translated by Tony Crawford
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.
... (read more)