Forgetting God and Remembering Thatcher

/
Claremont Review of Books.png

The Claremont Review, in its Summer issue, has a powerful excerpt from Solzhenitsyn’s forthcoming memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. These pages, written in 1987 but published here for the first time in English, describe Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 trip to London to receive the Templeton Prize for progress in religion and his meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“For exactly an hour we sat on sofas around
a low table, an hour of the most substantive
conversation, while Irina Alekseevna translat-
ed accurately and effortlessly. There were no
patches of empty courtesy, and no distraction
at all—just world and British politics today.”