GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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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]
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JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
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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