Last refreshed at 0600GMT Friday The best five books on everything | 30 July 2010

Young Stalin

Simon Sebag Montefiore
Image of Young Stalin

You can see in the young Stalin considerable signals that he is a very strange man with certain twitches, but a man of great charisma. I suppose the question that Sebag Montefiore doesn’t ask is whether Stalin’s imprisonments made him worse than he would have been otherwise. Stalin was a great bank robber, the Butch Cassidy of the Bolsheviks.