Oleg Gordievsky
Without doubt Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin by Alexandra Richie (Harper- Collins, £29.99) is a major event in the book world. This unique work on German history is important and relevant to the present, particularly today, when we are on the threshold of the return of its capital to Berlin. A deep academic monograph, it reads like an exciting thriller. Those pages that describe the multifarious life of 1930s Berlin, before and during the Nazis, the murderous fighting raging in the streets of Berlin in April 1945, the nightmarish predicament of the people in the east of the country under the conditions of occu- pation by the Red Army, will remain in the mind forever.
The year's biggest disappointment was Cold War by Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing (Bantam Press, £35). Permeated with anti-American bias and ignoring such central elements of the Cold War as the International Department of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, the role of the communist parties in the West as tools of Moscow, the East's exploitation of the Non-Aligned Movement, etc., the book is unacceptable as a reference book, especially for schools and universities.
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