‘Magnificent…’ Fred Inglis, Independent, 25 January 2008. Read full review here»
‘A really fascinating book from 2006 is Patrick Wright’s Iron Curtain… His idiosyncratic studies of tanks, London streetscapes and Dorset ghost villages have led to his being rightly lauded as one of Britain’s most original cultural historians. This new work, a beautifully written, character-rich portrait of the “long cold war”, is just as illuminating. A shame, then, that the shrunken intellectual horizons of mainstream publishing houses in the UK means that Iron Curtain is currently forced into self-published, samizdat-style circulation.’ Sukhdev Sandhu, ‘Books of the Year’, New Statesman, 27 November 2006.
[There was actually no samizdat edition: just a few bound copies of the draft that drifted about for a year or so after my contracted publishers at Faber and Viking Penguin (USA) headed for the door, their minds blown by a mixture of petrified Cold War ideology and fearful market realism…]
‘Another book I enjoyed was Patrick Wright’s Iron Curtain… Ranging from the bungling anti-Bolshevik intervention mounted by the Allies during the Russian civil war to the witless western progressives who travelled in the 1930s to a starving country and came back singing of an earthly paradise, and going right up to the close of the Cold War, it is the story of a metaphor that literally began on the stage and ended in a political theatre of the absurd.’ John Gray, ‘Books of the Year’, New Statesman, 22 November 2007.
For Paul Anderson’s ‘five books of 2007′ see here»
‘Theatrical metaphors apply themselves easily to the Soviet Union of show trials and parades, where every citizen had to act a role to survive. But the great strength of Wright’s quietly inspiring book is that it hums with contemporary relevance. In a polarised world of “us and them”, those who spoke of an iron curtain before Churchill were generally making a stand against the prejudices of the age (I think we’ll have to call Goebbels an exception). Whether it’s iron curtains or axes of evil, Bolshevik show-farms or media-manipulation, the phrases remind us to look beyond the “barriers of otherness” around us and see the people on the other side.’
–David Schneider, Sunday Times (9 December 2007). Read here»
’The iron curtain metaphor implied with some force that a compact sheet of iron had descended, parting the continent ideologically, politically and economically. However, the metaphor was neither new nor an invention of Churchill’s. In a newly published book, Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (Oxford University Press, 488 pp), the British cultural historian Patrick Wright illuminates the prehistory and use of the term. The fact that Churchill is not actually the father of the metaphor has been known for a long time. The book is nevertheless interesting since it attempts to trace the heritage and root system of a political metaphor. At the same time Wright actually pays attention to the political situation. The barrier between east and west was not only symbolic but indeed a powerful political and cultural reality, a heavily armed border brutally cutting Europe into two pieces…’
–Kim Salomon (Professor of International History, Lund University), Svenska Dagbladet (3 December 2007). Read the full article [in Swedish] here»
‘This has just been published in the UK and it’s the most original history book I’ve read for a long time - full of fascinating insights into both the origins of the phrase “iron curtain” (no, Churchill didn’t coin it in 1946 at Fulton, Missouri!) and more generally into relations between Russia and the West during the 20th century. It’s a big book that is rich in historical detail - the kind of study publishers are becoming afraid of publishing, which is why Penguin-US dropped it at the last moment. The loss is theirs!’
–PD Smith, on Amazon.com. For Smith’s review, published in The Guardian (17 November 2007), click here»
‘A profoundly moral work… fine work of cultural history…’
–Andrew Roberts, The First Post (9 November 2007). Read here»
’Wright’s account of the travels and opinions of the irrepressible Panait Istrati is among the most interesting in the book and sits well alongside more familiar accounts of Shaw’s fatuous observations and Duranty’s complicity. Istrati, a Romanian vagabond befriended by the writer Romain Rolland, established a reputation in France in the 1920s as a popular writer celebrating the rebellious traditions of the Balkans. He decided in the late 1920s to move to Soviet Russia and travelled the country with a grim determination to see for himself. In tandem with the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, he observed the repression of the left opposition in 1927, tried to visit the camps in the Solovki islands and contemplated with contempt other deluded tourists and the authorities who misled them.
He returned to France in February 1929, took a flat near another disenchanted old Soviet hand, Boris Souvarine, and wrote a three-part denunciation of Soviet Russia (two of which, according to Wright [actually, I said one - the third volume was by Victor Serge], were ghosted by Souvarine). When he returned in the 1930s to Romania, by now ill and dying, he found himself suspect to the right-wing authorities there, while being reviled as a traitor by his former friends on the left. “Long live the man who will adhere to nothing”, he declared at the end of his life, insisting that he no longer believed in any party, idea or man. “I am,” he affirmed, “the eternal opponent.”‘
–Judith Devlin, Irish Times (26 Jan 2008). Find review here»
‘A superbly researched and written exploration of a term which dominated the mindset of the West for half a century. It is an exhilarating journey and one which captivates the reader’s attention from beginning to end’.
–Marcus Papadopoulos, Tribune, 20 June 2008.
Eleanor Lee, New Statesman (25 October 2007). Read here»
‘I have read it from cover to cover, and enjoyed every page…’
–Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph (21 October 2007). Read here»
Charles King’s hatchet-job - a reply in the form of a letter to the TLS»