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“... What are we to make of the Red Army? On the one hand, it was the force that first stopped and then destroyed the armies of German National Socialism, in achieving which Russian soldiers suffered in ways that exceed the limits of Western imagination: the toll of dead – more than eight million – reveals numbers as the abstraction they are. And for much of the war those killed in combat were the lucky ones: the Germans let three million prisoners starve to death ...”

“... and postmodernist decentredness – a fake, perhaps, but an interesting one. As Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova’s’s superb book A Writer at War makes clear,* Grossman saw more of the war than any of them; more than any other writer. He volunteered to fight but, tubby and shortsighted and unathletic as he was, was sent instead to cover the war for ...”