PositiveThe Spectator (UK)The publication of The Unquiet Englishman is cause for celebration. A professor of English at Toronto University, and no relation, Richard Greene has already edited a valuable collection of Graham’s letters. Taking the high view that his subject is ‘one of the most important figures in modern literature’, and that previous biographers ‘lost sight of what mattered’ in focusing on ‘the minutiae of his sexual life’, he gives us a nicely written and well-judged cradle-to-grave portrait that needed to be conventional and unshowy and is all the better for it ... Richard Greene has mastered a tremendous amount of material. Greene’s travels and friendships spanned a world undergoing unusual political upheaval. His published works encompass journalism (including 600 film reviews for this magazine), plays, biographies and 26 novels. The result is a pared-down portrait that keeps to the track, but knows when to race ahead to tell us information to which we need not return — although, in his declared intention to avoid the salaciousness of his predecessors, Richard Greene walks sometimes too far down the plank of discretion.
Owen Matthews
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)Matthews has few illusions about his subject — ‘a bad man who became a great spy’ — or the challenge that he faces in exhuming him ... Drawing on the Soviet military intelligence archives in Podolsk, Matthews tells ‘for the first time’ the Soviet side of this eye-rubbing story. The Sorge that painstakingly emerges is a papier-mâché German-Russian doll composed of tiny and frequently self-contradicting fragments ... Readers who hunger for some humane, informed reaction to the horror unleashed by Stalin, and to an articulation of Sorge’s own disillusion, will wait in vain.
Duncan White
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)...[an] ambitious and constantly rewarding survey of writers who battled to get read in the Cold War ... [White\'s] research is impressive, presented in crisp, efficient prose with an eye for the encapsulating detail (e.g. Ho Chi Minh catching frostbite while queuing to pay homage to Lenin’s corpse). Even so, his parameters are a bit loosey-goosey. While prepared to bring Nicaragua into his sphere of interest, he strangely neglects to travel further south, most glaringly to Chile, where the CIA’s overthrow of the communist president Salvador Allende merits just half a paragraph ... That said, Cold Warriors fascinates in the areas it does choose to cover, and serves as a nostalgic reminder of a time when literature was a life-or-death matter.
Christopher Hitchens
PositiveThe TelegraphIf in this memoir Hitchens resists interrogating himself with the same vim, he is never less than lively, inquisitive, fearsomely well read and, best of all, an independent thinker. Most people you can package after hearing one snippet of their philosophy. You can’t package Hitchens, even when hearing all he has to say, which is quite a lot ... You sense that when push comes to shove he is more interested in being controversial than accurate ... Hitchens knows how to write; but there’s a whiff of old Edam in some of his potshots. As well, a whole pack of hounds not barking in the night ... And while he doesn’t have the monopoly he thinks he does on what it means to be alive, he makes journalism worthwhile, by forcing us to have one more reflection, take one more look.
