Diary – 16 November 2002

Whatever critics might say about Martin Amis’s Kobra the Dread, his recent book on Stalin’s atrocities, he was certainly right when he pointed out that people are generally indulgent, even flippant, about communist tyrants in a way they would never be about Nazis. This thought strikes me every morning as I walk through Canary Wharf on my way to work and catch sight of a large marble bust of Lenin, placed – by way of ornament – on a shelf above the counter of Mark Birley’s excellent sandwich bar. Next to Lenin sits a slightly smaller head of George Bernard Shaw. He is there, one suspects, not so much to commemorate his dramas, as in the role of ‘useful idiot’, as Lenin famously dubbed Western fans of the Soviet regime. Clearly Mr Birley and his sandwich people haven’t yet read Amis’s book. By contrast Ian Jack, the editor of Granta and former editor of the Independent on Sunday, who also owns a bust of Lenin, has, he told Guardian readers, been shamed by the book into demoting it from his mantelpiece to a less prominent position in his home.