Jon halliday enver hoxha biography

Reviews

Enver Hoxha, The Artful Albanian: the Memoirs of Enver Hoxha, edited and introduced by Jon Halliday, Chatto & Windus, London, 1986, pp394, £5.95

Material bearing upon the modern history of Albania is not at all rich.

Analysing it is not made any easier by the fact that the better sources come from the Yugoslavs, the sworn enemies of the regime, whilst the standard bibliography was compiled by one of its supporters in Britain, Bill Bland, with obvious intent to distort the true picture.

It must therefore be questioned whether a book about “a liar and his lies”, to misquote Trotsky, can possibly add anything to our basic understanding. But to take such a view would be to make a serious mistake. The editor of this book deserves real praise for setting about the thankless task of trying to distill some truth from Hoxha’s endless lying by checking it against the accounts coming from the Yugoslavs and British wartime intelligence.

If he has only b