Sheila Fitzpatrick

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the great betrayal' by Ben Macintyre

September 2014, no. 364 • 01 September 2014

Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby was the Third Man of the notorious Cambridge spy network set up in the 1930s and partially unmasked in the early 1950s, when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Moscow. He had been in British intelligence (MI6) since the beginning of the war, but had been working for Soviet intelligence for some years before that. A high-flyer, charming and sociable, he rose r ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'In My Mother's Hands: A disturbing memoir of family life' by Biff Ward

August 2014, no. 363 • 01 August 2014

For anyone who has ever complained about a difficult mother, or written a memoir about one, this is a humbling book. How trivial, by comparison, our complaints seem. The subtitle promises (or threatens) a disturbing memoir, and so it is. I found it difficult to get out of my head days after reading it. Biff (born Elizabeth in 1942) Ward was the second child of historian Russel Ward, author of The ... (read more)

'History vs Memoir' by Sheila Fitzpatrick

June–July 2014, no. 362 • 27 May 2014

In Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Sandcastle (1957), a young artist called Rain Carter is commissioned to paint a retired schoolmaster, Demoyte, an eccentric with an offbeat sense of humour. Instead of his usual attire – a shabby red velvet jacket with tobacco stains and bow tie – Demoyte turns up wearing a nondescript grey suit, explaining to a friend: ‘Am I to be summed up by a slip of a girl ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'Bluebeard's Bride: Alma Moodie, violinist' by Kay Dreyfus

February 2014, no. 358 • 17 January 2014

Alma Moodie’s story is remarkable, which makes it all the stranger that she has been so thoroughly forgotten. A frail child prodigy from central Queensland, she became Carl Flesch’s favourite pupil and a renowned concert violinist in Germany after World War I, friend and performer of most of the great figures of international contemporary music, from Max Reger to Igor Stravinsky. As no recordi ... (read more)

'In the Moscow archives' by Sheila Fitzpatrick

September 2013, no. 354 • 22 August 2013

There’s no ASIO file on me, not even a mention in someone else’s file, according to my keyword search. It’s almost insulting, given that I spent several years in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and later, as a Soviet historian in the United States in the Cold War 1970s, was suspected of being soft on communism. My father, the radical Australian historian Brian Fitzpatrick, had an ASIO fil ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life' by Artur Domosławski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

February 2013, no. 348 • 01 February 2013

A famous Polish communist foreign correspondent? It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but actually Ryszard Kapuściński did achieve international fame towards the end of the Cold War, after a highly successful career covering the Third World for leading media in the People’s Republic of Poland from the 1950s. Africa and, later, Latin America were his specialties; he was an enthusiast for de ... (read more)