In this week’s TLS – a note from the Editor

Victor Serge was for Susan Sontag one of the most compelling of twentieth-century heroes. He was a Russian writer and activist who, as Rachel Polonsky writes this week, exemplified the virtue of “the political intellectual without property or nationality, cleansed of the stain of revolutionary violence by his own marginality and failure and the eloquence of his conscience”. Some of that eloquence can be seen in his memoirs, written in Mexican exile in 1941, published now in their most unexpurgated form. Polonsky notes how Serge’s novels, “with their various (self)-portraits of nobly troubled men of action” are drawn from “the cinematic atmosphere and political pathos” shown in his recollections of revolution itself.

John Cornwell and George Bornstein consider two wartime leaders who could not (or chose not to) be so clear cut in their positions. Cornwell reviews new books on Pius XII, the Pope who steered a nervous course between Allies and Axis, a balancing act that has since inspired fierce critics as well as fervent admirers. “For those who have no vested interest on either side”, he notes, there are now “two reliable, complementary studies” of one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic figures. Bornstein reviews FDR and the Jews, a sympathetic study of Roosevelt and his predicament over the protection of European Jewry in an age of “widespread anti-Jewish feeling”. The authors’ sympathy, he argues, sometimes skews their judgement, particularly towards anti-Semitic remarks used as “an ice-breaker” in conversations with Ibn Saud and Stalin. 

Peter Rutland calls the break-up of the Soviet oil industry one of the twentieth century’s greatest dramas, a play that has created more than a hundred billionaires in a country where twenty-five years ago it was criminal speculation to sell jeans in the street. He praises Thane Gustafson for writing the “definitive work” on a world of virtuous capitalists and violent crooks, even if sometimes, perhaps, saying rather less than he knows.

Peter Stothard

To view this issue’s Contents Page, click here.