MORE ON THE LEFT: I must rush out and purchase the latest book by Martin Amis. It's called "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million." Here's what the "Los Angeles Times" says about it:

Koba the Dread ("Koba" was Stalin's childhood nickname) is about what Amis calls the "chief lacuna" of the 20th century: the failure of Western intellectuals to condemn the grotesque horrors perpetrated in the USSR even as they were happening, and their reluctance to fully repudiate some of their communist sympathies since. (To put this in perspective, the horrors include the murder of some 20 million people and the misery of almost everybody else.)

And this:

...the book does a brilliant job of rubbing the left's face in the mountains of corpses that resulted from its favorite political philosophy. That it has been done more thoroughly before isn't quite the point, since those who did it, most notably Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the historian Robert Conquest, are still sometimes seen as reactionary while a Marxist historian like Eric Hobsbawm is given an adulatory press.