History and Biography

In the world of historical biography and even historical fiction, it seems to be the age of dictators all over again. Biographies of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and novels on Caligula and Idi Amin, pour off the presses. Last year, there were at least ten books on Stalin alone, and this year Robert Service delivers a Stalin, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday a Mao – and Richard Overy a comparison between Hitler and Stalin.
 
In case, we delude ourselves too much on the significance of writing history, I discovered recently that there are plenty of people who remain untouched. While researching my book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar in Tbilisi, in his homeland Georgia, I bought a huge oil painting from the 1950s, showing Stalin in his Generalissimo’s uniform with combine harvesters threshing behind him. When I got home I had it framed. I was staying with my parents when the framer arrived to deliver it. He took it in to my parents, and on the way out he said to me, ‘I can see the resemblance to your father but not to you. He was a military man was he, your grand-dad?’