As a journalist, he has worked for numerous British newspapers, including The London Evening Standard, The Times and The Daily Mail.
His first book, Twelve Days (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006, Pantheon 2006), was an acclaimed history of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.
He sat on The Advisory Council of The UK based in Wilton Park, the think tank and discussion forum for international affairs.
... Lenin was the godfather of what commentators a century after his time call 'post-truth politics'.He built a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was justified for a greater end.
Angelica Balabanova, one of his old comrades who admired him for many years but grew to fear and loathe him, said perceptively that 'Lenin's tragedy was, in Goethe's phrase, he desired the good ... but created evil'.