Moss's merit
Sir: What is Patrick Marnham on about in his running lament against Robert Moss? This Moss seems to appear in respectable places — intellectually speaking — such as Encounter and the Telegraph. His books, to judge by Chile's Marxist Experiment, which I have at last got hold of, seem to be a bit dull — an academic virtue — but clear and well-ordered, and all the statements nicely referenced. He seems to be doing a job both necessary and difficult, in getting the facts about various places and/or happenings: Chile, Iran — of the greatest importance both in reality, as various points of major Marxist pressure, and in Marxist and automatic-Leftist propagandacum-mythology, or indeed hagiology/demonology.
I have a distinct impression, from casual paper-reading and library-nibbling, that the sort of thing Mr Moss is doing is, in general, rather hard to get published and publicised, at any rate in proportion to its appalling necessity. I may be being biased here — I did a study once of the coverage of Nazi Germany in the '30s in the cream of the British press (including the Spectator, which on the whole came out best), and was quite horribly struck by the virtually total absence of factual coverage once it was clear, from about October 1933, that something might have to be done. A long row of ostrich bottoms, as it were (and it were).
We rational press, I mean — oughtn't to try to do him whenever we have half a column-inch under our control, ought we? I mean, if you were the Observer or the Sunday Times or the New Statesman I wouldn't be writing. Anti-Mossism would be normal automatism, wouldn't it? But the Spectator?
Geoffrey Stone 82 Archery Road, London SE9
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