TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY THE FAILURE OF POLITICS AND THE PARTING OF FRIENDS

ANNE APPLEBAUM Allen Lane, 224pp, £16.99

Anne Applebaum is an American journalist and historian who has spent large parts of her life in Britain and Poland. Her survey of the rise of

nationalist and far right parties in Europe and America doubles as a memoir of the last 20 years and begins with an account of a New Year’s Eve party in 1999 given by the author and her husband Radek Sikorski at his partially restored estate in Poland. It ends with another party two decades later, when ‘about half the people who were at that party would no longer speak to the other half’. This is partly reflective of Polish politics – Sikorski having previously served as Foreign Minister was on bad terms with the ruling Law and Justice party – but also of divisions on the right in Britain, America, Hungary and Spain.

Separate chapters are given to developments in each of these countries, interspersed with portraits of friends and acquaintances named and shamed for supporting extremist nationalist parties. It is not a book about the dispossessed but about members of educated elites going over to the dark side. In the Spectator – where Applebaum used to work as deputy editor – Douglas Murray took the author to task for daring to quote Boris Johnson at a private dinner in 2014: ‘Nobody serious wants to leave the EU.’ This, to Murray, was a ‘significant betrayal of confidence’ in a book littered with similar examples. But John Kampfner in the Guardian judged the book ‘all the more powerful’ for the fact that it was ‘intensely personal’. David Goodhart in the Literary Review also thought that Applebaum ‘uses her insider knowledge to good effect’.