MEMOIRS OF AN INTERPRETER

Utterly British in its modest goals and straightforward style, this book is the work of an English citizen who spent the years of World War II serving as a Russian translator for the British embassy in Moscow as well as at other locales. As part of his wartime service, he acted as Churchill's translator at Moscow, Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam. As such, he makes some small observations on the personality of such major figures as the British Prime Minister, Roosevelt, and Stalin. He goes some way in humaning Stalin but otherwise nothing really new about the mighty is revealed. Having been born in St. Petersburg of British parentage, and having remained in Russia until the 1917 Revolution, when he was twenty-eight years old, the author treats us to a poignant revisiting of his childhood haunts forty years later. Only someone seriously interested in wartime Europe will want to read this unpretentious book.