BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (1993) Amy Knight   Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky (2009) Bernard M. Patenaude Amy Knight's biography of Beria, who Stalin referred to as his Himmler, was written at a transitional point in the historiography of the Soviet imperium, between the Cold War history created out of guesswork and propaganda and the post-perestroika opening up of Russian archives. It is an excellent book in that context. Beria the man is not very interesting. He is the type of the intelligent corporate psychopath who helps keep complex and otherwise chaotic systems in place but Beria as part of the construction of a unique form of totalitarian governance is much more fascinating. The weakness of the book is that Knight still had to rely on a number of very unreliable 'testimonies' (whether Khrushchev's, Svetlana Alliluyeva's, Sergo Beria's and many others) for lack of data at key periods and that she still cann...

Fulcanelli and the Alchemical Revival: The Man Behind the Mystery of the Cathedrals (1990)   Genevieve Dubois  The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved (2000) Colin and Damon Wilson   The Secret History of Lucifer; The Ancient Path to Knowledge and the Real Da Vinci Code (2005) Lynn Picknett   Who Are The Illuminati? (2005)  Lindsay Porter   Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear (2008) Daniel B. and Jason Freeman   Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-Religions (2009) Ronald H. Fritze We will start by getting rid of the worst book. The translated tome on Fulcanelli the alchemist is dreadful - poorly written, obscure, poorly translated, poorly edited, pompous, deeply incoherent and providing no context or analysis. It contains some interesting photographs and some less interesting but at least accurately photographed documentation. You are left with an impression of a set of more than a little nutty marginalised figures living from...

Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (2008)   Richard B. Spence   Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (2014) Marco Pasi I n Lobster , the premier journal of para-politics in the UK, I argued that more latitude should be given to historians when dealing with the shadowy world of espionage. I had an interest as someone initially trained as a historian, who had participated in a range of political projects and who often had had to deal with cases of political manipulation damaging the reputation of persons who were clients or friends of mine. The 'truth' about the grey world between official record and unrecorded action is generally handled in one of two ways. Professional historians will rely solely on the records available and refuse to speculate on what might be missing. This might mean that no lies are told but it might also mean that interpretations of events are incomplete or that we see historians unwittingly writ...

The Undergrowth of Literature (1967)   Gillian Freeman with an introduction by the psychiatrist David Stafford-Clark   Sex And Spirit: Ecstasy, Ritual And Taboo (1996) Clifford Bishop   Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (2006) Hugh B. Urban   Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006) Esther Perel     The Undergrowth of Literature is an intriguing bit of history, both because it was written in the mid-1960s when sexual liberty was under discussion openly for the first time in decades and because of the subject matter - the types of pornographic literature available at the time. The inclusion of women's magazines from a feminist perspective and Marvel Comics from a fetishistic perspective make it a true curiousity. It is not a great book. It is of its time. But it is useful to read because it shows how much we have changed since 1967. Intellectuals cannot n...