The Worst of Times

Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest (Norton, 336 pp., $26.95)

HISTORY is not what it was. Or, to put it another way, what we were encouraged in the schoolroom, or even the college lecture hall, to regard as an immutable series of facts turns out to be a shifting pattern of argument and interpretation, as substantial as smoke. Winston Churchill put it rather well in November 1940, in a clever and—under the circumstances—remarkably generous eulogy of his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain:

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Robert Harris

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Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest (Norton, 336 pp., $26.95)

HISTORY is not what it was. Or, to put it another way, what we were encouraged in the schoolroom, or even the college lecture hall, to regard as an immutable series of facts turns out to be a shifting pattern of argument and interpretation, as substantial as smoke. Winston Churchill put it rather well in November 1940, in a clever and—under the circumstances—remarkably generous eulogy of his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain: