Portrait of Robert Service
Reading List
Robert Service
Historian and Professor at Oxford · University of Oxford
Robert Service is a British historian of Russia and Emeritus Professor of Russian History at Oxford, best known for biographies of the three men who made and inherited the revolution.
Lenin: A Biography (2000) was followed by Stalin (2004) and Trotsky (2009), completing a trilogy drawn substantially from archives opened after 1991. He has also written A History of Twentieth-Century Russia, Comrades: A World History of Communism and The End of the Cold War.
He is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Hoover Institution.
My Life
An Attempt at an Autobiography
by Leon Trotsky
“This is one of the books I read when I was starting to move into historical study. It’s a wonderful memoir of a childhood and young adulthood. Trotsky is a wonderful writer. I think he is one of the two great political writers of the 20th century, the other being Winston Churchill. But, as you move through the book, you get a very strong sense of a man who is justifying his own politics and his own career choices.” — via Interview, January 2010
Selected Poems
by Aleksandr Blok
“He centred on a rabble that was roaming through the streets of Petrograd at the end of 1917. And he used this very refined language that he had developed many years earlier and he combined that with snatches of folksong and street jargon that make for one of the really great pieces of Russian poetry – and also world poetry – in the first half of the 20th century.” — via Interview, January 2010
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“I read this in my second year at college when I was still doing Russian literature and my very enlightened tutor said that I could just stop doing the rest of the 19th-century curriculum and concentrate on Dostoevsky for a year. I have never regretted it. I think Dostoevsky understood psychological and social contradictions in life to a peak of intensity later writers have seldom been able to match.” — via Interview, January 2010
History of the Peloponnesian War
The Landmark Thucydides
by Thucydides
“Reading Thucydides was just a magical experience because of the way he attends to causation. I love the attention he gives to supplying the reader with all manner of possible explanations before going for the one that he prefers. He has an almost surgical precision in the way he weighs up one factor against another. He is one of the most original historians.” — via Interview, January 2010
1984
by George Orwell · 1949 · Fiction
“And I think that one of the great things about Orwell’s account of totalitarianism is not just the tremendous power that 20th-century dictatorships have exercised, but also how sordid and squalid the living conditions are for many of the people there. And I’m impressed by how individuals, with any independence of mind, still managed to survive those conditions.” — via Interview, January 2010