The opening line in most obituaries of Robert Conquest, who died on August the third, described him as a “historian and poet.” That would be a capacious enough description for most men of letters. In Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, Charon keeps A. E. Housman waiting on the banks of the River Styx for a second arrival since he is expecting two people, “a poet and a scholar,” until Housman says shyly: “I think that must be me.” In Bob’s case Charon would have been waiting for a historian, a poet, a novelist, a satirist, a critic, a diplomat, a strategist, a soldier, a social and political theorist, a limerickist, and of course a scholar—and I have almost certainly left out some of Bob’s other professional identities. Charon probably brought along a second boat.

It is well-nigh impossible to do justice to a life of such varied achievement. Most of Bob’s obituaries rightly focused therefore on the most important aspects of his public achievement (in particular his histories: The Great Terror on Stalin’s purges and The Harvest of Sorrow on Stalin’s forced Ukrainian famine). They made clear that his accounts of the dictator’s crimes (in particular, the number of his victims) had first been challenged and later vindicated; they attributed a major change in the world’s opinion of Soviet communism at least in part to his work; they gave lesser but still important standing to his literary achievements; and they gave a general impression