Another Albion

Although the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha was a dedicated culture warrior and racist whose prisons were anything but soft, he rather blotted his honorary-Britishness copy-book by also being a Stalinist (socialist, in journalese) with nothing to sell. Nevertheless, it appears that a memoir of life under his rule is viewed as something of a provocation by the more patriotically inclined. The autobiography, by a Marxist immigrant of the female tendency at the London School of Economics who has so far managed to evade the moral cleansing of academia, criticises Hoxha's régime but also presumes to criticise, of all things, market forces. It has thus received a bumpy reception from those who haven't read it, and others among the more spiritually British of the author's compatriots.