Although, to judge by what one reads, real levels of literacy continue to decline in America, there is one sense in which we may be said to be a hyperliterate culture. This is in the challenge taken up by an apparently ever-increasing number of self-consciously artful prose stylists to make historical events their own by (as we may say) writing them up, and turning them into literature. One of the most striking recent examples is to be found in Martin Amis’s book, published last summer, called Koba the Dread: Laughter and the 20 Million. For some reason, though he had nothing new to tell us about them, Martin Amis thought that the crimes of Josef Stalin had been insufficiently commemorated by the “several yards of books” that he had read on the subject and so set out to convert the gruesome tale into a Martin Amis-style postmodern novel.

Hence the subtitle, which leads us to a number of ineffably silly and offensiv ...

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