The Red Hotel

A riveting trip down the corridors of Soviet deception …Philps’ book is almost faultlessly balanced between racy narrative and historical analysis * Sunday Telegraph *A fabulous book, packed with untold stories, written with the lyrical empathy of an author who knows and feels his subject deeply – Patrick BishopThe Red Hotel is a sizzling read full of bitchiness and high jinks. But it is also a deeply moral book, outlining a simple truth: that the press pack abroad often operates in a bubble and is deeply dependent on local translators and fixers. Philps has an eye for detail and a heart for those left behind as the press caravan moved on * The Times *Philps adroitly uses the experiences of the wartime correspondents incarcerated in the Hotel Metropol in Moscow to tell at least part of the story of Stalin’s campaign to dupe the West about the nature of his regime … The Red Hotel gives a superb flavour of the compromises, betrayals and self-delusions require to report on the USSR * Literary Review *Philps’s book vindicates the value of truth, most of all by depicting the lengths that a rare few will go to share it * Washington Post *Philps is terrific at training a spotlight on the local staff who are so often forgotten, and exposing the moral ambiguities of journalists * Spectator *The Red Hotel is a compelling and often horrifying tale of moral degradation and occasional heroism superbly told by a seasoned reporter * Economist *Balanced between racy detail and historical analysis…a riveting study * Daily Telegraph *An engaging and insightful account…an experienced and accomplished foreign correspondent himself, Philps does an excellent job of recreating a sense of time and place * History Today *

Alan Philps is a fluent Russian speaker, who has worked as a reporter in Moscow on and off since he was the Reuters trainee there in 1979 - in the Brezhnev era when the system of isolating correspondents from the local people, except for some authorised ballet dancers and such like, was very much still in place. As a senior reporter, he worked there in the 1980s under leaders Mikhail Gorbachev, and the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin. Alan has kept up a connection with the Metropol Hotel, staying there several times to attend charity balls.

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