George Walden

Books on China tend to cover the Communist period from 1949 until today.

“A vegetating catastrophe” would make an apt description of present-day Russia.

Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein are rude about nearly everybody in their new book.

Here is a new genre in Holocaust memoirs: Otto Dov Kulka, a distinguished Jewish professor specializing in Nazi history, waited till his sixties before recording his own stay in Auschwitz as a boy.

“It is not easy to really know China, because China is an ancient civilization.”

There’s an old Soviet joke about a Radio Moscow listener calling in with a question.

Do you sigh for a world without evil? A place where criminals are conscience-stricken and altruistic folk of all nations sit down together to make peace?

Here’s a nifty piece of timing: “The Age of Deception,” a memoir by Mohamed ElBaradei , has arrived in bookstores at the moment when its author is seeking to replace Egypt’s toppled president, Hosni Mubarak .

Everything about Otto von Bismarck was off the scale: his rages, his disloyalty, his mendacity, his gargantuan appetite and his colossal chamber pots. So, too, was the political genius of the greatest, if least lovable, statesman 19th-century Europe had to offer.

The onslaught would begin, American war planners assumed in the 1950s, with the detonation of nuclear bombs secreted by Russian operatives in Washington, New York and at ports and airfields.

Any notion that Lizzie Collingham’s “The Taste of War” might be a whimsical new take on World War II is dispelled in its first pages. A former research fellow at Jesus College , Cambridge, Collingham has produced a first-rate, substantial and enthralling addition to the literature.

Two steps forward, one back. That’s the pattern with modern China, and today looks like a “one back” moment.