A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, .
The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, , was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.
Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.” , during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.
