Jon Halliday

All writers know about lunch. A good lunch with one’s publisher is sometimes the only thing that keeps one going on a project threatening to go stale. The worst thing that usually looms over the soup is a missed deadline. The diaries of Parviz Radji, the Shah’s last ambassador to London, are largely about lunches and dinners, many of them spoiled by subjects weightier than missed deadlines. Abuse of civil rights, imprisonment without trial and, above all, torture ruin many a delicious meal. By the end a picture of Khomeini on the front page of the International Herald Tribune can cause Radji and his guests to gag before they have even finished peeling their artichokes.

Albania has distinguished itself for secretiveness even among secretive Communist governments, vouchsafing little information to either its own people or the outside world. Now, suddenly, out of this hermetically-sealed country has exploded a series of volumes unprecedented in the history of world Communism, more remarkable and much more revealing than Khrushchev’s Memoirs. Over several thousand pages, the Albanian leader, Enver Hoxha, vents his undying rage against ‘revisionism’, his wilfully blind adoration of Stalin, his fierce nationalism, in tones which are alternately aggrieved, suspicious and self-righteous. He is windy, vulgar and brutal. Yet within the rigid framework of 100 per cent Stalinism lurks a shrewd and lively observer who can quote hunks of Byron to visiting British Army officers during World War Two.