Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Romanticism is good in poetry but can be fatal in real life.  “The lot of the man who sees life truly and thinks about it romantically is Despair,” says Bernard Shaw [Preface to Caesar and Cleopatra ].  Some of the finest poets in the history of English literature met their end in the prime of their life.  Will Durant argued that they were killed by their romanticism.  Shaw wouldn’t have disagreed. Today’s Hindu newspaper reports that “Sixty years after death, Stalin (is) turning hero for Russians.”  Celebrating the 60 th anniversary of Stalin’s death, “a majority of Russians” expressed the view that “the Soviet dictator had played a positive role in Soviet history.”  The report goes on to say that “The number of people who called Stalin the most outstanding historical figure jumped from 12 per cent shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union to 36 per cent in 2008.”  And now 49% of Russians view Stalin as a great hero “even though they are aware of millions of innocent peop

Author: Ken Follett Publisher: Penguin, 2012        Pages: 940 Price: Rs399 Ken Follett is a master of epic tales.  He has woven mesmerising stories with wide arrays of memorable characters who are the warp and weft of the fabric of history.  They are characters who either shape the history or are shaped by it.  They are masters or victims.  But they are never puppets dangling from the mechanical fingers of some robotic history.  They are the normal human beings, partly good and partly evil, some strong and others weak, some of whom dare while others cower. Winter of the World differs from those novels, however.  Its characters are more puppets dangling from the warp and weft of history.  The real persons who shape and manipulate the history are Hitler and Stalin.  Yet they hardly appear in the novel; they work like invisible gods through their agents, the Gestapo and the NKVD, both of which are ruthless in hunting down perceived enemies. The plot of the nov