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Studious rebel
Intriguing account of Lenin's time in London
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The Spark that Lit the Revolution: Lenin in London and the Politics that Changed the World
By Robert Henderson
IB Tauris, £25
Lenin warned against turning leaders into icons after their deaths. Unlike most of the biographies of a man whose ideas increasingly resound amid the world’s accumulating crises, Robert Henderson’s archival snapshots put human flesh on the intellectual and political bones of a figure who remains either revered or hated to this day.
Seeking a base to edit and publish Iskra (the spark), the official paper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), safe from the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, Lenin made a number of fleeting visits to London in the first decade of the 20th century.
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