GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
A convoluted ‘shaggy dog story’
A book that will be relished by those who can’t wait for another socialist nightmare story, suggests JOHN GREEN
TORTURE BY POETRY’: GROMA Kolibri typewriter, Made in East Germany, c1956
[Pic: Sommeregger and Stasi logo jgaray both Creative Commons]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War
By Philip Oltermann
Faber & Faber £14.99
PHILIP OLTERMANN is the Guardian’s German correspondent and is clearly keen to jump aboard the gravy train of Stasi horror stories. In discussing this latest “Stasi revelation” book, it is difficult to know where to start in terms of trying to discover factual nuggets buried beneath the huge slagheap of fabulation.
In researching his book, Oltermann takes the easy seam, already well mined by his forerunners. He plunders the “Stasi Archives” to investigate the story behind a poetry circle set up by members of the GDR’s Ministry of State Security (MfS) or, in Western jargon, “the Stasi.”
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JOHN GREEN has doubts about the efficacy of the Freedom of Information Act, once trumpeted by Tony Blair
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