European Reading Challenge #1

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Eastern Approaches - Fitzroy Maclean

To read Eastern Approaches is to be swept into the vortex of the 20th century’s most turbulent theatres - Moscow, the Western Desert, and the mountains of Bosnia - by a narrator who combines the composure of a diplomat with the audacity of a commando.

Fitzroy Maclean, a young British envoy with a taste for the forbidden, begins his odyssey in Stalin’s Moscow, where in the spring of 1937, the air is thick with suspicion and the streets cower in silent terror of Stalin’s bloody purges. Assigned to the embassy, he slips the leash of officialdom and in the autumn ventures into Soviet Central Asia, a land of minarets and mirages, where commissars frown and peasants whisper. His accounts from Samarkand are not those of a tourist, but of a witness - one who sees through the Potemkin facades to the machinery of repression beneath.

Maclean’s reportage of the 1937 Moscow show trials is chilling in its clarity. Here, the Old Bolsheviks - Bukharin among them - confess to crimes they did not commit, in a masquerade of the absurd that Orwell and Koestler would later echo. It is a portrait of gangsters devouring democratic socialists, and Maclean captures it with the precision of a man who knows he is watching history as nightmare.

From the snows of Russia, the narrative shifts to the sands of North Africa at the end of 1942. As a soldier in the Special Air Service, Maclean trades his diplomatic briefcase for explosives, executing raids behind enemy lines with a flair almost stereotypical of English and Scots doggedness. His account of the Benghazi raid is a narrative of controlled chaos, and his capture of a pro-Nazi Iranian general reads like a scene from a John Buchan novel.

But it is in Yugoslavia – Bosnia - that Maclean’s story reaches its crescendo in the late summer of 1943. Parachuted into the mountains by Churchill’s command, he becomes Britain’s man with Tito - a liaison, a strategist, and, at times, a partisan himself. The Yugoslav resistance, fierce and fractious, is rendered with nuance and admiration. Maclean’s mission was to assess and assist, but he also observed, with the eye of a writer and the conscience of a believer in democracy.

Eastern Approaches is not merely a memoir; it is a testament to the strange glamour of peril and the enduring value of bearing witness. For hardcore readers drawn to the shadows of totalitarianism, the dust of desert warfare, and the fire of resistance, this is essential reading.