Russia, censorship and Jonathan Dimbleby
I’m currently reading Jonathan Dimbleby’s ‘Russia: A Journey to the Heart of a Land and Its People’ . The pretentious title is not representative of the book’s content. Dimbleby writes nicely and he has synthesised his reading of the country’s history and literature in an accessible fashion, but in no respect does he penetrate to the heart of a land or its people, simply because he is too busy bemoaning the wrong-headedness of the land’s people. And in any case he seems unable to appreciate any landscape or culture that cannot be compared to England’s Home Counties. Perhaps I will review the book when I have finished it. There is certainly entertainment to be derived from reading the thoughts of a frustrated, frankly lascivious little man, enduring some manner of mid-life crisis in a foreign land which he obviously had little inclination to visit in the first place. On this occasion it is the political analysis which Dimbleby advances, deriding all alternative synopses offered by ...