4 OCTOBER 1969, Page 18

Shorter notice

The Siege of Leningrad Harrison E. Salis- bury (Seeker and Warburg 84s). The writing is on occasion melodramatic and some of the anecdotes are impossibly silly, but this will remain a valuable and exhaustively re- searched account of the grisly 900 day siege of Leningrad in 1941-44—at the height of which, so they say, people prostituted them- selves for a cupful of sugar-soaked earth and a woman was thought to have ground her daughter into meat patties.