The anniversary of the annus mirabilis 1989 has encouraged inevitable analysis of why the Berlin Wall came down, why no one quite anticipated it and how much any single individual can in decent truth be praised or blamed. Vladimir Tismaneanu reviews a wide range of books that offer explanation, praising Victor Sebestyen for his “vivid portrait” of the Stalinist leaders of the time, detailing the “frantic womanizing” of East Germany’s Erich Honecker, the “pathological vanity” of Romania’s Nicolai Ceau£escu and “the narrow-minded slyness” of the Bulgarian Todor Zhivkov. Did Mikhail Gorbachev make a decisive difference? The historian Constantine Pleshakov is dismissive of the Soviet reformer. Our reviewer concludes that he “dramatically altered the rules of the game”.

If the leaders of Eastern Europe were variously engaged in the run-up to their year of trial, those of 1914 shared a common pursuit, shooting birds from the sky. Miranda Carter has written a triple biography of George V, Wilhelm II and Nicholas II, stressing their shared mediocrity and passions. Nicholas is judged just about the worst of the three. Philipp Blom praises Carter’s “insistent gaze into characters that might have sprung from an imagination as merciless as Flaubert’s and as absurd as Gogol’s”.

With men like these, what role has there ever been for diplomats? Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN during the Iraq war of 2003, has been prevented so far from publishing his own book of praise and blame for Blair, Bush and Saddam. This week he considers his former colleague Sir Ivor Roberts’s new edition of Satow’s Diplomatic Practice, a “treasure” for separating the calls of “duty from stupidity” and understanding how matters ought to be handled by men of reason.

This is also the issue of the TLS in which we review a selection of journals more specialized than our own. The “Golombok Rust Inventory of Marital State” is, it seems, a critical tool for subscribers to the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy.

Peter Stothard

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now