Brezhnev: A Short Biography by The Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee
(Pergamon Press, Oxford)

Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead. There is no author’s name on the title page, merely a modest line of italic type advising us that Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev’s ‘short biography’ has been composed ‘by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee’. This is the one statement in the entire opus which is undeniably true. Only an Institute could write like this: