“When we parted, he to return to the squalor of a gulag in Siberia, me to the comfort of a manor house in the English countryside, I once again possessed a copy of the book. But this time it was not locked in a suitcase, but in my mind, from where the authorities could not confiscate it. As soon as the wheels of the plane had lifted off from Russian soil, I began to write down the master’s words. First on BOAC headed paper, then on the backs of menus and finally on rolls of toilet paper, which was all that was still available.”

Laughter broke out in the hall, which Harry hadn’t anticipated.

“But allow me to tell you a little about the man. When Anatoly Babakov left school, he won the top scholarship to the Moscow Foreign Languages Institute, where he studied English. In his final year, he was awarded the Lenin Medal, which ironically sealed his fate, because it gave Anatoly the opportunity to work in the Kremlin. Not a job offer you turn down unless you wish to spend the rest of your life unemployed, or worse.

“Within a year, he unexpectedly found himself serving as the Russian leader’s principal translator. It didn’t take him long to realize that the genial image Stalin portrayed to the world was merely a mask concealing the evil reality that the Soviet dictator was a thug and a murderer, who would happily sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of his people if it prolonged his survival as chairman of the party and president of the Presidium.

“For Anatoly, there was no escape, except when he returned home each night to be with his beloved wife, Yelena. In secret, he began working on a project that was to become a feat of physical endurance and rigorous scholarship, the like of which few of us could begin to comprehend. While he worked in the Kremlin by day, by night he set down his experiences on paper. He learned the text by heart, then destroyed any proof his words had ever existed. Can you begin to imagine what courage it took to abandon his lifelong ambition to be a published author for an anonymous book that was stored in his head?