MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Comrades, not colleagues
HENRY BELL is moved by the account of scientists under seige in Leningrad who preferred to starve rather than sacrifice their life-saving work
IMPOSSIBLE CHOICES: A victim of starvation in besieged Leningrad suffering from muscle atrophy, 1941
[George Shuklin/Museum of the Siege of Leningrad/CC] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad
Simon Parkin, Sceptre, £25
IMAGINE being faced with the very real dilemma of whether you should eat your life’s work in order to survive. What if that life’s work was the very struggle against hunger itself. The scientists at the All Union Institute of Plant Breeding faced just this dilemma as they endured the longest and most brutal siege known to humanity, surrounded by the world’s first and greatest seedbank.
In 1941 the Plant Institute in Leningrad – a requisitioned palace filled with every variety of grain, potato, pulse and fodder – was at the heart of a city besieged by the armies of Nazi Germany. For nearly 900 days Leningrad held out against fascism in one of the most crucial stands of the second world war. Simon Parkin has produced a pacy and dramatic account of the Siege of Leningrad, centring on the scientists in the city, and the ordinary and extraordinary decisions they made in order that their work would survive.
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