Soviet Cars book review

Soviet cars

Spluttering to a halt

Jul 10th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile By Lewis H. Siegelbaum Cornell University Press; 309 pages; $39.95 and £20.50 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

THEY were the butt of jokes in the West. (“How do you double a Lada’s value? Fill up the tank”). Inside the Soviet Union, however, the quantity and quality of the cars it produced epitomised both the system’s failure and the capitalist world’s advantage.

Cars bring freedom of movement (at least until the roads are full of them) and symbolise personal aspiration: both were frowned on in the Soviet Union. In “Cars for Comrades”, Lewis Siegelbaum, a professor at Michigan State University, provides extensive examples of the mental knots in which the Communist leaders tied themselves, wanting on the one hand to boast about their superiority over the West on all fronts, and being unable and unwilling to match it when it came to cars. A revealing bit of Soviet jargon applied to owners of cars was chastnik, meaning, roughly, a suspicious private person. Until the early 1960s, Mr Siegelbaum reports, vandalism against private cars was dismissed by the police as an understandable expression of egalitarian sentiment.

“Cars for Comrades” is a bit too generous. The truth was that even for Communist Party members, a private car was a huge and barely obtainable luxury for most of the decades of Soviet rule. Only in 1972 did the Soviet Union begin producing more private cars than trucks. And once it did, as Mr Siegelbaum aptly notes, it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. One reason, of course, was the glaring unfairness. For the Soviet elite, cars were plentiful. Some, like Leonid Brezhnev, had big collections of Western cars. The system also provided luxury limousines such as the sleek black ZIL. These were unreliable and thirsty, but a horde of mechanics took care of them.

As you became less important, life got worse. Lower down the range, there was the Volga, a mid-size saloon whose interior tended to fill with petrol fumes. The Lada was an obsolete Fiat, produced at the Togliatti factory south-east of Moscow: bought new, it required extensive repair in order to become roadworthy. Soon after that it would start rusting. Getting it serviced was a nightmarish process involving long waits, the use of personal favours, and unpleasant discoveries (light-fingered mechanics would steal scarce items such as the wing mirrors or windscreen wipers).

Soviet cars weren’t all bad: the excellence of Soviet engineering in the military field sometimes filtered through to civilian life. The Niva, an adapted army jeep, was a highly-strung but handy 4x4; oddly it is unmentioned in the book. Your reviewer bought a new one for $4,000 in 1998. It caught fire shortly after purchase, but then gave excellent service until its gearbox seized up four years later.

But those were rare exceptions. The worst Soviet cars were almost comical: when the Oka was launched in 1987, Mr Siegelbaum notes, “like the Zaporozhets [its predecessor], with which it shared a diminutive size and lack of safety features…it quickly became the subject of horrifying stories and mordant humour”. And for ordinary citizens, getting hold of even the worst rattletrap involved many years of waiting.

Even good cars fare poorly in Russia’s climate. The harsh winters, sloppy construction and scanty maintenance mean bad roads; salt and grit take their toll on bodywork. It is not surprising that Russia’s elite nowadays favour huge jeeps, invariably foreign-made. It is a pity that Mr Siegelbaum’s book has such poor photographs: for those who never experienced the true horrors of Soviet-era motoring, words are not enough.

Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile.
By Lewis H. Siegelbaum.
Cornell University Press; 309 pages; $39.95 and £20.50

Andrew Brown book review

Sweden

Potential turbulence

Jun 26th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared By Andrew Brown Granta; 261 pages; £15.99 Buy it at Amazon.co.uk

FISHING, journalism, and the death throes of the Swedish social system are the unpromising ingredients of Andrew Brown’s thought-provoking autobiographical memoir. The story of a young drifter who rebels against a privileged upbringing in Britain and goes away to work in a pallet factory in provincial Sweden in the late 1970s might seem impossibly dull. But Mr Brown’s prose is as clear and bewitching as the lake waters in which he learns to fish. Having immersed himself, and the reader, in the all-encompassing conformism, thrift and diligence of the Sweden of that era, he charts the story of his own rebellion, disenchantment and ultimate reconciliation with a country that in the meantime changes almost beyond all recognition.

Having learnt his trade by jotting down choice phrases on bits of cardboard in the factory, Mr Brown becomes a journalist. Sweden proves surprisingly interesting: Soviet submarines haunt the coast, provoking panicky incomprehension in a public convinced that virtue equals untouchability. A secular priesthood of social workers snatch children from “elitist” parents (though that scandal, he later discovers, turns out to be not what it seems).

Flushed with success, he abandons small-town Sweden (and his first wife and child) for the delights of London. His time as Britain’s best reporter of religion and his early evangelism for the internet are all but omitted; material, perhaps, for another book. Instead the focus is on his regular trips back to Sweden, sometimes as a correspondent, sometimes in search of somewhere sufficiently remote to write books: swapping what he calls the mosquitoes of distraction in city life for the thought-inducing real ones of a Swedish forest in high summer.

Readers who know the Nordic countries will delight in the author’s keen ear and eye for the nuances of language, landscape and social customs. The polite incomprehension prompted by a papal visit to a place with almost no Roman Catholics is particularly well drawn. A Finnish journalist colleague invites Mr Brown to feel her thigh: she is wearing suspenders and a garter belt in what she coyly tells him is a protest against the church’s repressive sexual mores. She follows it up with an invitation to dinner in Helsinki later. In some parts of the world, that would count as quite unusual.

The fish and the weather don’t change (though Mr Brown’s growing prosperity as a journalist means that he can afford better kit). But Sweden does. As the harsh echoes of the impoverished, hierarchical system of the 1930s fade, so too does the moral tone of the society. It is only the memory of poverty that creates the social discipline necessary for prosperity, he suggests; once that is forgotten, the seeds of decay begin to sprout.

Mr Brown is an interesting man; introspective and with perhaps a touch of prissy self-importance. Much the same goes for Sweden; like him, it has become less unusual than it used to be. Once home to a system that seems to modern eyes as distant as communism, it is now a more-or-less normal capitalist country, troubled by the task of integrating the tenth of the population that consists of unhappy and often unseen immigrants. What comes next? Even the sapient Mr Brown does not venture a guess.

Owen Matthews "Stalin's Children" review

Russia

Hot love in the cold war

Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War By Owen Matthews Bloomsbury; 308 pages; £17.99. To be published in America by Walker Books in September. Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

TERROR, stagnation, exile, hope and disillusion are the fabric of Russian history in the last century. These are also the backdrop for Owen Matthews’s poignant history of his family’s battle with Soviet bureaucracy at its most callous and Western officialdom at its most complacent.

His father Mervyn was one of the earliest British graduates allowed to study in Russia in the 1950s. This changed his life. First, he fell in love with Lyudmila, the frail, brainy daughter of a senior communist purged in the 1930s. Second, he flirted with the KGB. They insisted that he work for them. When he refused, he was expelled, permanently, from the Soviet Union. Lyudmila’s repeated applications for an exit visa were denied.

That could have been the end, among millions of other commonplace tragedies in the decades that the Kremlin devoted to creating paradise on earth. But it wasn’t. Showing great reserves of determination, Mervyn Matthews spent the next five years running a threadbare but relentless campaign to get Lyudmila to Britain. He buttonholed any public figure who could help, harassed the press and infuriated Foreign Office mandarins who regarded the whole affair as an irrelevant nuisance. He travelled round Europe to try to lobby visiting Soviet bigwigs, and even managed twice to slip into the Soviet Union on visa-free day trips from Finland to see her.

In between he wrote daily to Lyudmila in spare but affectionate prose. He carefully kept copies of his own letters and of her replies, which are steeped with frustrated uxoriousness (love mixed with fussing about his diet and clothes). Through these extracts the reader can almost smell the longing and the willpower. They also show how the couple’s unhappy families—Mervyn’s father is absent because he disliked his relations, Lyudmila’s because he died in the Gulag—made them seem to match each other so neatly.

The campaign for Lyudmila cost Mervyn his academic career. He did not publish his work on Soviet sociology for fear of offending the Kremlin. After lobbying a visitor to his Oxford college too brusquely, he was eased out and took a job at another university which he despised. In Moscow, Lyudmila was hounded for her love affair with someone from the enemy camp.

Astonishingly, the sacrifices were vindicated. In 1969 the Matthews case and that of two other couples were bundled up with an East-West spy swap. Lyudmila came to Britain. The marriage proved less than blissful, although it was saved by dogged loyalty on both sides. Lyudmila adapted poorly to English life; her shy, spartan husband’s grit in adversity proved greater than his husbandly capabilities.

But the marriage did produce the author, a legendary hellraiser in Moscow in the 1990s, and now a respectable foreign correspondent. The crisp and admirably self-deprecating vignettes of his own life, both emotional and professional, give his parents’ story a fitting perspective. Few books say so much about Russia then and now, and its effect on those it touches.

Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War.
By Owen Matthews.
Bloomsbury; 308 pages; £17.99. To be published in America by Walker Books in September.

Marshall Goldman book review: "Petrostate"

The Future Is in the Pipeline

Wall St Journal June 19, 2008; Page A13

Petrostate (Published in the UK as Oilopoly: Putin, Power, and the Rise of the New Russia)

By Marshall Goldman
(Oxford, 244 pages, $27.95)

Natural gas is a monopolistic business: Building even one pipeline is expensive; building another makes no commercial sense. Russia, with its huge natural-gas reserves, uses its monopoly on east-west pipelines to promote Russia's political interests -- and reacts toughly when challenged. Marshall Goldman sets out these disturbing truths in "Petrostate," a bleak and yet spirited account of Russia's energy politics. The West, Mr. Goldman makes clear, should be wincing at its own vulnerability.

The story, as Mr. Goldman tells it, starts with the first oil boom in the czarist era, when Russia and America together produced 97% of the world's oil. Foreign companies were booted out of the Soviet Union by Lenin and Stalin, only to be invited back in again (on different terms) when their technological expertise was missed. After the fall of communism there was a reverse involvement: Foreigners rushed into Russia to help set up a post-communist economy, only to retreat a few years later.

In between came the era of Soviet go-it-alone energy policy, when oil and gas revenues became the vital prop for Leonid Brezhnev's ailing planned economy. As in so many other parts of the Soviet system, ingenuity battled with incompetence, and incompetence won. The Central Intelligence Agency may have helped matters along by encouraging the Saudis to crash the oil price in the 1980s -- Mr. Goldman suggests as much -- but in the end, he argues, it was the Kremlin's mismanagement of its energy reserves that doomed the Soviet system.

Such incompetence lingers. The greedy and shortsighted engineering practices of the past all but ruined many Russian oil fields: It was routine to pump water in to get oil out, regardless of the consequences. The challenge for current Russian engineers is to coax Russia's shattered geology to cough up more oil -- for example, by drilling horizontally, not vertically. That's a tricky technical challenge. Arguing over the best approach to oil-extraction is at the root of the current row between BP and its Russian partners. The Russians want a dash for cash, while BP is seeking careful, long-term management of the oil fields.

Russia shows more savvy when it comes to selling natural gas abroad, where it has used its pipelines to skewer Europe, striking bilateral deals that might make short-term sense for individual countries but that undermine the leverage and bargaining power of the continent as a whole. Europe is three times bigger than Russia by population and about 10 times bigger in economic terms, yet the eagerness of individual countries for Russia's terms makes Europe politically vulnerable to Moscow's divide-and-prosper strategy. As Russia builds relationships with energy companies that might have been in a position to seek other sources of gas, Europe's ability to diversify its suppliers diminishes -- and becomes a prohibitively costly proposition.

Standing in the nerve center of Gazprom's Moscow headquarters -- staring at a 100-foot wall that electronically displays the spiderweb of natural-gas pipelines spreading across Europe from Russia -- Mr. Goldman marvels: "What an empowering feeling! Should they choose to, those Gazprom functionaries could not only cut off natural gas from the furnaces and stoves of 40 percent of Germany's homes but also the natural gas that many German factories need for manufacturing."

In other words, Ronald Reagan's warnings in the 1980s, about the political dangers of Western Europe's dependence on Soviet gas, now seem prescient. Today Western Europe relies on Russia for half of its natural-gas imports.

It is sometimes argued that Russia's increasing energy consumption and its stagnant production -- its output of natural gas has been virtually flat for the past four years -- will lead to gas shortages in Europe. (They are already biting hard in Russia.) Mr. Goldman dismisses such fears, though much too briefly to be convincing. He also sees no danger of an international natural-gas cartel forming along the lines of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, one that would presumably include Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Trinidad.

Russia would never let its decision-making be affected by others, Mr. Goldman says. That may be true in the case of price-setting (where the economics are quite different from the oil market, because oil is traded on the spot market, whereas the international gas business is mainly based on long-term contracts). But a possible Organization of Gas Exporting Countries could still help bolster Russia's position by consolidating producer power in exploration, pipeline routes and the market for liquefied natural gas.

The biggest hole in "Petrostate" is its skimpy treatment of the European Union. An important question facing the EU now, for instance, is whether its energy liberalization policy -- unbundling the wholesale and retail businesses in gas and electricity -- will help or hinder the Kremlin. A fragmented market may be even easier to manipulate. Mr. Goldman's sharp mind would be well-suited to untangling such intricacies.

The unanswerable question is whether the Kremlin -- or more precisely, Vladimir Putin -- will use gas as a weapon to gain international political influence. The optimistic view is that business normalizes politics -- in this case, that Russia's need to be a dependable partner will require it to soften its political edge and conform to international standards of behavior. Pessimists fear that gas dependency will lead to the Finlandization of Europe. On the evidence so far, the pessimists have the better chance of being right.

Mr. Lucas is the author of "The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West" (Palgrave).

Book Review

Tony Judt

Appraiser appraised

Apr 17th 2008

From The Economist print edition

TONY JUDT is a polymath. He was born in Britain into a family of Jewish refugees and now lives in America, where he teaches at New York University. He has an enviable grasp of European cultural history and a sharp and sometimes savage turn of phrase, both of which are well displayed in this collection of long essays and book reviews.

Mr Judt is at his best attacking those he believes mischaracterise or misunderstand intellectual giants like Arthur Koestler and Primo Levi. Myriam Anissimov's book on Levi, he says, is “uninspired and mechanical”; her narrative “a choppy mix of long excerpts” mixed up with “clunky and inadequate summaries of ‘context’.” Mr Judt sees Ms Anissimov's misunderstanding of Levi's significance as akin to describing Ulysses (Levi's literary hero) as being nothing more than “an old soldier on the way back from the wars who encounters a few problems en route. Not false, but hopelessly inadequate.”

Yet these demolition jobs just clear the stage for the main performance, which is Mr Judt's own shrewd and revealing thoughts on the subject in question. At the end, long after you have forgotten Koestler's “Darkness at Noon” and only dimly remember that Levi made chemistry interesting, you feel you have been eavesdropping on a sparkling conversation.

Mr Judt skewers two revered figures: Louis Althusser (a Marxist theorist and narcissist, madman and murderer) and Eric Hobsbawm, the grand old man of English left-wing history. He carefully dissects Mr Hobsbawm's evasions and euphemisms on the subject of the millions of murders committed in the name of the communist cause he still espouses: “Eric Hobsbawm is the most naturally gifted historian of our time; but rested and untroubled, he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age.” It is a performance worthy of George Orwell.

Mr Judt's sorties on religion, politics and economics are less judicious and drip with contempt for modern politicians. In the introduction he laments that the period between the collapse of communism and the Iraq war were locust years, a “decade and a half of wasted opportunity and political incompetence on both sides of the Atlantic.” Perhaps. But it is hard to find any age in recorded history in which politicians covered themselves in glory.

The authoritative tone which is so convincing when he is talking about the continental intellectuals of the last century works less well when it is peddling the conventional wisdom of the left. Mr Judt's attempt to explain Britain by discussing the decline of its trains, for example, verges on the ludicrous: Britain's privatised railways may have their problems but in 2007 they recorded the highest number of passenger-miles since 1946.

More controversial are his attacks on Israel and what he regards as the all-powerful Israel lobby in America, which, he says, squelches debate and is pulling both countries towards disaster. Mr Judt's opinions are well-known and widely debated, which undermines his argument that they are rarely heard. Many will find both judgments and facts awry. Does Israel really have “no” friends apart from America? He echoes, with apparent approval, the notion that the Jewish state “is widely regarded as a—/the/—leading threat to world peace”. The italics are his.

Mr Judt also often adds a pompous-sounding endnote to his essays, preening himself over the controversy while dismissing other voices. Energetic readers may enjoy looking up the references, but it would serve the cause of truth better if he had printed his assailants' remarks alongside his own. Mr Judt, it would seem, enjoys dishing out criticism, but is less willing to take it on the chin himself.

Sergio

United Nations

A brave man's journey

Feb 21st 2008
From The Economist print edition

Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World By Samantha Power Penguin Press; 622 pages; $29.95. Allen Lane; £25 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

TIMID bureaucrats not headstrong brainboxes may leap to mind when United Nations officials are mentioned. But Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed when jihadists blew up his UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2003, was an exception. Samantha Power's detailed and sympathetic biography tells the tale of a Brazilian expatriate whose world outlook was shaped by the left-wing idealism of Paris in 1968 but then tempered by ever-increasing doses of reality.

By the end of his life, Vieira de Mello had junked the Marxism and anti-Americanism of his youth, as well as the niceties of UN procedure. He saw law and order as a vital adjunct of peacekeeping; he believed international intervention worked only if it was cloaked in legitimacy; and that it was always necessary to engage with the worst people in a conflict, if only to see how best to neutralise them.

The book provides a thoughtful account of the conflicts and disasters that changed his mind. These stretched from Lebanon to Cambodia, from Rwanda to ex-Yugoslavia, from East Timor (his biggest success) to the post of UN human-rights commissioner and, finally, to catastrophe in Iraq. He was on the scene during the dying spasms of the cold war and the birth pains of the new American century: cajoling parties to the conflict, wheedling outsiders for money and fuming at the leaden, out-of-touch officials back home.

Ms Power, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government, describes Vieira de Mello as “brave but enigmatic”. He was willing to do things and go to places that most international bureaucrats would have found too risky: bringing the Khmer Rouge to the negotiating table was a high point. In the blurry world between humanitarian aid and international law he was as good as it gets, wielding a mixture of ambiguity and decisiveness with the personal and institutional authority to make it all, sometimes, work.

As a person, he remains a bit of a puzzle. He was a great womaniser—in a way that perhaps seems more scandalous now than it did in the 1970s—yet he stayed married to a faraway wife for two decades. He was an arch pragmatist, but remained idealistic about the UN's goals. He was a brilliant leader of a small team, but bad at managing a big one. He seems to have relied heavily on charm.

A striking lesson from the biography is the incompetence that surrounded Vieira de Mello after he was blown up. As he lay trapped in the ruins, rescuers tried frantically with their hands to shift the rubble. What they needed were planks to stabilise the debris and jacks to lift it. All that came too late. The UN, which had previously failed to blast-proof the windows of a headquarters under imminent threat of attack, was then too stuffy to fly his Baghdad-based Argentine fiancée all the way to his memorial service in Brazil.

Nabokov review

Vladimir Nabokov

Imagination ablaze

Feb 14th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics By Nina L. Khrushcheva Yale University Press; 233 pages; $28 and £18.99 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

IMAGINARY conversations with dead people are risky materials for a book, as are authorial comparisons with geniuses. So Nina Khrushcheva, great-granddaughter of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, and herself an émigré Russian intellectual, is doubly ambitious in her slim volume of autobiographical literary and political reflections on Vladimir Nabokov, believed by many to be the greatest Russian writer of the last century.

She is ambitious too in her panoramic and sometimes dizzying sweeps through two centuries of Russian culture and politics. The reader who opens the book and finds references (on a random two pages) to Tertz, Pushkin, the Mnemosyne, Koncheyev, Godunov-Cherdyntsev, Brodsky and the “bamboo bridge” between poetry and prose could be forgiven for feeling intimidated. If he happens then on the sentence, “I saw myself in many ways walking in Nabokov's footsteps,” he might even sense a whiff of impudence.

But Ms Khrushcheva's approach is both accessible and modest. A self-deprecating tone saves her from pretentiousness. And from her opening contention, that “Nabokov's journey from obscure Russian émigré writer to the author of American and world literary classics is essential for understanding Russia's past, its present and its future”, she wears her learning lightly. If you are not quite sure at the beginning of the book who Pushkin was and why he matters, you will know enough by the end to appreciate her finely drawn comparisons and contrasts between these two towering literary figures, and feel only mildly miffed by the publisher's sloppy omission of an index, or any pictures of the places she so eloquently describes.

Ms Khrushcheva's central point is that Nabokov bridges the gap between tsarist Russia (mystical, feudal and isolated) and the West far better than either the forced modernisation of communism, the chaotic shock capitalism of the 1990s or the authoritarian self-confidence of the Putin era. Nabokov, she says, presents the future of Russia for this century: a place that balances both the “indifference of democracy” and “heroes of kindness” such as perhaps his greatest character, Timofei Pnin (an émigré academic who is both besotted with America and at sea in it).

That reflects the two great dilemmas in Russian intellectual life: reconciling the horrors of the past with the potential of the present, and defining Russia's relationship with the West. The first of these is hampered by scanty foundations: Russia's rulers have shown an unpleasant taste for persecuting the brightest and best, sending them into exile, or simply having them murdered. That makes it all the harder to find a firm foundation for confident engagement with the West without surrendering the spiritual and emotional qualities of which Russians are justly proud.

Nabokov and his works, Ms Khrushcheva explains, taught her “Westernisation”: how to be an individual in a place that lacked a state ideology to provide form and meaning to life. “How to be a single ‘I’ instead of a member of the many ‘we’ in that vast undifferentiated traditional collective of the peasant commune, the proletarian mass, the Soviet people, the post-communist Rossiyane [Russian nationals]...He kept his soul without having to remain backward in order to do so.”

Fired up, Ms Khrushcheva returned to Moscow in 2001, hoping to share this gospel with literature students, only to find she was too late. Nabokov was already the flavour of the age. Her students could quote his works by heart. “They found the 19th-century writers too dramatic, too pathetic, and those of the 20th century too critical, unhappy and dissident. Post-communist literature is too trashy. But Nabokov is just right!”

That didn't survive Putinism (another sign of her country's impatience for bad short-cuts, she reckons) but inspired her to write this excellent book, and to dedicate it to the great Abram Tertz. That is a good choice. Tertz was the pen name of Andrei Sinyavsky, sentenced to seven years' hard labour in 1966 for the crime of publishing literary criticism abroad. Protests on his behalf by Andrei Sakharov and others marked the birth of the Soviet dissident movement. His “Strolls with Pushkin” 30 years ago was criticised by many for being insufficiently reverential. Ms Khrushcheva's imaginative memoir may be too. That is all to its credit.

Something for the weekend, sir?

Sexual fantasies

Secret cinema

Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition

Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head?: The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies By Brett Kahr Basic Books; 304 pages; $28. Published in Britain as “Sex and the Psyche: The Truth About Our Most Secret Sexual Fantasies”; Allen Lane; £12.99 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

ASKING strangers to recount their most private thoughts about sex is unlikely to make a dull book, and Brett Kahr's compendious research into the psychology of sexual fantasy is gripping. It is also somewhat alarming.

Leave it open on your desk at work, and prudish colleagues or bosses may think your reading matter highly unsuitable. If you have children, it is not the sort of thing (unless you are very modern-minded) that you would leave around at home. In particular, the middle section is unsparingly explicit about every possible sort of erotic daydream. It includes sentences such as “let us immerse ourselves in some representative incest fantasies”. (Let's not, some readers may feel.)

Not that it is all so hair-raising. Some people, not unexpectedly perhaps, fantasise about celebrities. A handful imagine romantic tenderness with their real-life partners. But many of those surveyed say they like thinking about doing disgusting things with, to, or in front of, total strangers, or (perhaps more unsettlingly) the people they love.

The case studies are not dirty stories, however. They are part of a big, solemnly academic, five-year research project. Mr Kahr, a London-based academic and therapist, surveyed (anonymously) 18,000 people in Britain and America in conjunction with YouGov, an internet pollster, and conducted 132 five-hour interviews. The upshot is that nine out of ten people have sexual fantasies, mostly pretty lurid ones—and Mr Kahr thinks the remaining tenth are crippled by shame, guilt or repression.

Any sense of prurience is relieved by Mr Kahr's prose, which is sympathetic, witty and erudite. He quotes Latin tags and Italian opera confidently, and wears his psychoanalytical learning fairly lightly. Blessed with what he calls “a strong psychological digestive tract”, he is not the sort of person to run shrieking from the room in horror, or to phone the police, when he finds out that someone confesses to relaxing by thinking about extreme sexual violence towards unsuspecting strangers. Instead, he tries to work out why so many people find sexual fantasy so important.

A lay person might count boredom and natural weirdness as the most likely fuel for fantasies. But Mr Kahr focuses on nasty experiences in the past. Fantasies are a way of rewriting childhood history, sometimes to wreak revenge on abusive or absent adults, sometimes to sanitise memories of them. A woman was attacked from behind as a small girl by her mother, who smashed her head into a glass table. As an adult, her fantasy is about having her breasts caressed by a faceless stranger who reaches over her head.

The guts of the book are to be found in the final chapter, where Mr Kahr answers the 21 questions he poses at the outset. These include the empirical, such as the definition, purpose and prevalence of sexual fantasy, and more ticklish dilemmas. Should one confess fantasies to a partner? (Probably not.) Are fantasies a sign of a relationship in trouble? (Not necessarily; they may be a safety valve.) And do we control our fantasies, or vice versa? (For most people, it's a bit of both.) Best think twice, though, before suggesting this for your book club.

Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head?: The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies.
By Brett Kahr.
Basic Books; 304 pages; $28