Writing on the Wall
Somehow I missed this terrific profile of Robert Conquest that appeared in last week's Guardian. (Airstrip One and Cinderella, once again, have come to the rescue, bearing links and comments.)
Many details I hadn't been aware of, particularly regarding his literary activities, and some familiar items that can never be quoted or celebrated enough. One of these last, which I first remember seeing as a carefully inscribed graffito on the wall of a UC Berkeley library men's room, is what has to be the greatest non-pornographic limerick of all time:
There was a great Marxist called Lenin
Who did two or three million men in
That's a lot to have done in
But where he did one in,
that grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.