Neal Ascherson

“Where is legality, as we understand it, when it is considered perfectly normal for the police and public prosecution staff to break into a defence lawyer’s office during a trial and seize all his files on his client – as happened last October in the case of Platon Lebedev of the Yukos oil corporation? Those who try to justify this sort of thing have to fall back on an argument which is venerable, brutal, dangerous and yet not to be dismissed out of hand. The argument is that legality is not an adequate weapon against those whose power is itself illegitimate, and who consider themselves above the law.”

“Mikheil Saakashvili is 36 years old, dark and already a bit joufflu, wildly talkative and often indiscreet. His own rhetoric is ebullient. He will break down Georgia’s monstrous corruption, bring order to the chaos of state finances, set the nation on a course towards the European Union, get rid of the Russian military bases, deal (we don’t yet know how) with the ten-year-old secession of Abkhazia . . . everybody wants to share his optimism, and to believe in their own vaulting expectations. But Georgians have seen a lot of false dawns.”

“He was not paranoid, as Stalin was, but somehow drew energy from the idea that everything and everyone in the cosmos treated him as an upstart, a stubby-fingered boor who must not be allowed to succeed. He would show them. He did show them. The chip on his shoulder was the biggest carried by any leader in history, Napoleon and Hitler not excepted. It was heavy enough to crush the world, and in the Cuba crisis of 1962, it very nearly did so.”

Beevor uses his sources to bring into focus a rather touching picture of Eva Braun, preparing for suicide with her usual kindness and neatness. The new fox-fur would go to Traudl the secretary; the dressmakers’ bills must be burned; her sister could retrieve Eva’s broken diamond watch from the SS, who had found a prisoner to repair it.

When Patrice Lumumba was murdered, on 17 January 1961, white women all over Western Europe, North America and the ‘settler’ countries of Africa began to see him in their dreams. I have met women in London and Cape Town, Berlin and Los Angeles, who talked about this haunting. Sometimes he was a black priapic bogeyman; more often, he was a dark and reproachful presence who inspired...