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“... and other characters, take up a good deal of space in the novel, they are ultimately unimportant: Rybakov uses them only to fill out his portrayal – fascinating as social history – of Muscovite life in the Thirties. The novel is dominated by two characters: Sasha Pankratov, the hero, an obvious self-portrait of the author, and Stalin. Thrown out of the ...”

“... A more serious defect is that Volkogonov, evidently begrudging the laurels won by Solzhenitsyn and Anatoli Rybakov, has blended fiction with historical research, ‘Stalin,’ Volkogonov writes, ‘cast his mind back into the distant past, when on Lenin’s orders, he went to the Eastern Front with Dzerzhinsky.’ Or: ‘he stood up, deep in thought, and ...”

“... At some point it must have crossed Braine’s mind to call his latest novel ‘Love at the Top’. The hero is Tim Harnforth, a 56-year-old best-selling novelist and man of letters. Originally from the West Riding, he is now one of the gens du monde, ‘a high-flyer, a metropolitan man’, literary-lioning it in London. Young admirers come up to him in pubs and say: ‘Mr Harnforth? Mr Tim Harnforth?’ One and Last Love is Mr Tim Harnforth’s novel as well as Mr John Braine’s ...”