Sir Malcolm Rifkind praises The Dead Hand

Posted on 2011/01/17 , tagged as

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Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP has given David E. Hoffman’s The Dead Hand, published in early February, a ringing endorsement:

‘I found The Dead Hand extremely stimulating. As a Foreign Office Minister I was involved in Gorbachev’s meeting with Margaret Thatcher; and as Defence Secretary from 1992-95 I was very much associated with the safe removal of post-Soviet states’ nuclear weapons. This book is an excellent history of that period.’

The book also enjoyed its first British review over the weekend, in the Financial Times. They said:

‘This book, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and is soon to be published in the UK, is in the best traditions of American long-form reportage… Key characters are evoked in enough detail to make us care and then carry the narrative through to the end. It involves simplifications and elisions: but in this case, these are less important than the horrified fascination Hoffman – a former Washington Post Moscow correspondent, later foreign editor – succeeds in rousing through a story at once journalistically detailed and morally alive.’

Read the FT’s full review by John Lloyd here.