Harold Shukman – författare

'Here is a vivacious account of how in the 1950s, under Eden and Lloyd at the Foreign Office, some 5,000 young men doing national service were quietly siphoned off from their units, secluded in Cornwall and Fifeshire, or, more boldly, next door to the Guards depot at Coulsdon in Surrey, and put through crash courses in Russian till they could speak it fluently ...' M. R. D. Foot, SpectatorLambasted by the Soviets as a 'spy school', the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) was a major Cold War initiative, which pushed 5000 young National Servicemen through intensive training as Russian translators and interpreters, primarily to meet the needs of Britain's signals intelligence operations. Its pupils included a remarkable cross-section of talented young men who went on to a diversity of glittering careers: professors of Russian, Chinese, ancient philosophy, economics; the historian Sir Martin Gilbert; authors such as Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn; screenwriter Jack Rosenthal; stage director Sir Peter Hall; and churchmen ranging from a bishop to a displaced Carmelite friar. Geoffrey Elliot and Harold Shukman, both of whom emerged from JSSL as interpreters, have drawn on many personal recollections and interviews with fellow students, as well as once highly classified documents in the Public Record Office, in order to reveal this fascinating story for the first time.'A highly entertaining read ... No one interested in late 20th century theatre or literature can afford to ignore this book.' Spectator'Elliott and Shukman write with style and wit ... They record something more than a byway in the history of the cold war, a true contribution to British history.' Michael Bourdeaux, Times Higher Education Supplement'An engaging, quirky account of this strange offshoot of the Cold War ... a kind of Virgin Soldiers for clever clogs.' Michael Leapman, Independent

This single volume is an authoritative and accessible guide to the background and progress of the Revolution, written by a team of over forty specialist contributors. Beginning with the radical movements of the mid-nineteenth century, the Encyclopedia covers the development of the revolutionary movement created by the intelligentsia; the condition of the peasants, that of the working class, and of the army; the role of the Tsarist secret police; the 'agents provocateurs'; the revolutionaries' own underground. A substantial section is devoted to the emergence of liberation movements among the national minorities of the borderlands. The Encyclopedia also considers the formation of Soviet institutions, and examines too the emergence of revolutionary culture well before 1917, the avant-garde in art and theatre, and the relationship to the revolution of three major Russian writers, Blok, Gorky and Mayakovsky.

This is the verbatim record of a secret and hitherto unpublished meeting, held in the Kremlin in April 1940, devoted to a post mortem of the Finnish campaign.

Born in 1879 in Georgia, Stalin joined the Bolsheviks under Lenin in 1903 and became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. These edited papers reassess the deeds, policies and legacy of a man who was responsible for innumerable deaths and untold human misery.

The perfect introduction to the man whose dark arts caused scandal across Russia

This is the verbatim record of a secret and hitherto unpublished meeting, held in the Kremlin in April 1940, devoted to a post mortem of the Finnish campaign.