Sheila Fitzpatrick

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'Putin: His life and times' by Philip Short

September 2022, no. 446 • 25 August 2022

In the era of Russia’s war in Ukraine, who would be a ‘Putinversteher?’ (‘Putin-understander’) is the disdainful German term used for someone trying to negotiate the perilous path between Putin-apologist and Putin-denouncer. Understanding Vladimir Putin means grasping how Putin himself sees the world he is operating upon. Philip Short, a former BBC foreign correspondent in Moscow, has co ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'The Red Witch: A biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard' by Nathan Hobby

July 2022, no. 444 • 25 June 2022

Katharine Susannah Prichard is one of those mid-century Australian literary figures like Vance Palmer whose name is mentioned in literary histories more often than her books are read. As it happens, she was a schoolfriend of Vance’s future wife, Nettie, née Higgins, who became a distinguished literary critic, as well as of the pioneering woman lawyer Christian Jollie Smith, and Hilda Bull, late ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'The Party: The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning' by Stuart Macintyre

April 2022, no. 441 • 23 March 2022

Stuart Macintyre was in a league of his own as a historian of communism. That’s not just a comment on his status as a historian of the Communist Party of Australia, whose first volume, The Reds (1999), took the party from its origins in 1920 to brief illegality at the beginning of World War II, and whose second, The Party, covering the period from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s, now appears p ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'The Summer of Theory: History of a rebellion, 1960–1990' by Philipp Felsch translated by Tony Crawford

March 2022, no. 440 • 20 February 2022

‘Theory of what?’ is the obvious lay response to Philipp Felsch’s title. But for those in the know, it goes without saying that he is talking about Theory with a capital T. That strange hybrid of philosophy, ethnology, and literary criticism cast its spell over participants in the student movement in Germany from the mid-1960s and in Paris after 1968. In the 1980s and 1990s, it reached the h ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet home front during World War II' by Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer

September 2021, no. 435 • 19 August 2021

When I was a graduate student in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, Russian friends used to talk a lot about World War II. Their stories were of hardship and suffering stoically borne by the population and finally vindicated by victory in 1945. This was not dissimilar from what was published in the Soviet press on the subject, but without the press’s obligatory references to the wise leadership ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'The Last Million: Europe’s displaced persons from World War to Cold War' by David Nasaw

January–February 2021, no. 428 • 16 December 2020

This is a book in the expansive American tradition of long, well-researched historical works on political topics with broad appeal, written in an accessible style for a popular audience. David Nasaw has not previously worked on displaced persons, but he is the author of several big biographies, most recently of political patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy. If you are interested in displaced persons beca ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'Traitors and Spies: Espionage and corruption in high places in Australia, 1901–50' by John Fahey

October 2020, no. 425 • 24 September 2020

I am a great fan of archives, and so is John Fahey, a former officer of an Australian intelligence service (the Defence Signals Directorate) turned historian. His previous book, Australia’s First Spies (2018), covered the same time period (1901–50) but focused on the good guys (our spies) rather than the bad ones (their spies). His itemised list of Australian, British, and US archival files co ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'The Ratline: Love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi fugitive' by Philippe Sands

June–July 2020, no. 422 • 26 May 2020

Hunting Nazis is an almost guaranteed reading pleasure – the joy of the chase, plus the moral uplift of being on the side of virtue. I started Philippe Sands’s book with a sense both of anticipation and déjà vu. A respected British international human rights lawyer with the proven ability to tell a story, Sands should be giving us a superior version of a familiar product. Many readers will r ... (read more)

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl guide to the future' by Kate Brown

October 2019, no. 415 • 23 September 2019

This is a very disturbing book. It’s not just the Chernobyl story, but also Kate Brown’s broader story about the worldwide but inadequately studied impact on public health of lifetime exposure to ‘chronic doses of man-made radiation from medical procedures, nuclear reactors and their accidents, and atomic bombs and their fall-out’. But let’s take Chernobyl first. Cover-up is a big part ... (read more)

Ives Westlake Debussy (Australian String Quartet)

ABR Arts • 09 September 2019

Nigel Westlake’s new quartet, Sacred Sky, commissioned by the Australian String Quartet, had its première before an enthusiastic audience at Sydney’s Recital Hall on 4 September 2019. Westlake wrote it in honour of his sister, the artist Kate Westlake, who died of pancreatic cancer in January 2018. He is not the first composer to write a quartet on a sibling’s death: Felix Mendelssohn did t ... (read more)