Though overall the book is serviceable, there is a major lapse. For all his occasional severity, in the final section ("Interpreting the Fall of Communism") Brown tumbles into a Marxist elephant trap. "Communism turned out to be a ghastly failure," he writes, though its ideology included "some genuinely humanistic aspirations, trampled on though they were by the party-state authorities." One might as well argue that there is something in the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei.

It wasn't the party-state authorities who did the trampling, it was the theory of Marxism-Leninism itself, to which these authorities owed their being. It is a fundamental illusion to suppose that "genuinely humanistic aspirations" can be pursued by an ideology that prescribes a life-and-death dictatorship of one group of people over the rest, which is inhuman by definition. There are no means or ends about it, these two aspects of the creed were irreconcilable from the start. When will we ever learn? On communism, I fear, never quite.