Robert Conquest: ‘There is something particularly unpleasant about those who, living in a political democracy, comfortably condone terror elsewhere’

Robert Conquest, the historian of Soviet Russia who has died aged 98, was also The Spectator’s literary editor between 1962 and 1963. The following essay was published in the magazine on 4 May 1961, in response to a letter published in the Times about the Bay of Pigs Invasion. 

The round robin on behalf of some supposedly Leftist cause is a well-established little nuisance which we should all have got used to by this time. The letter sent by Mr. Kenneth Tynan and others to the Times on Cuba has, I find, been felt as more than customarily irritating by a number of writers and others to whom I have spoken about it – all of them people thoroughly devoted to social and racial equality, internal and international, none of them Fascists, parachutists, or employees of American, Spanish or Portuguese secret agencies – in fact, not even Conservatives. So, as a special exception, in spite of the arguments against paying any attention to such stuff, I feel impelled, just, to give some expression to a distaste which is not only my own.

Most of the signatories seem to be critics or dramatists.