The Maisky Diaries: Red ambassador to the Court of St James’s 1932-1943Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.) (YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 632 pp, £25)Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 01420 592974 “History will be kind to me,” claimed Winston Churchill, “for I intend to write it myself.” He did, too, his six-volume history of the Second World War winning him the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the first volume, The Gathering Storm, dealing with the years leading up to war, there are precisely two references in the Index to the Soviet ambassador in London from 1932 to 1943, Ivan Maisky. Yet in this first volume of Maisky’s diaries there are 147 references to Churchill. Why the great discrepancy? Because, as we now learn, the two were having frequent, long