Hoover fellow Robert Service was awarded the 2009 Duff Cooper Prize for his biography Trotsky.
“Robert Service delivers an outstanding, fascinating biography of this dazzling Titan. It is a compelling adventure story—the ultimate rise and fall—but also revelatory as the scholarly revision of a historical reputation,” wrote Simon Sebag Montefiore in his review of the book in the London Telegraph.
Service, a noted Russian historian and political commentator, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. In his research for Trotsky, Service drew on collections from the Hoover Archives, noting that “the gem in the Hoover Archives is the first draft of Trotsky’s autobiography, which has much information he excluded from the printed version.”
The Duff Cooper Prize celebrates the best in English-language nonfiction writing: a work of history, biography, politics, or poetry. The first award was made in 1956; it has been given annually ever since. Anne Applebaum, a media fellow at the Hoover Institution, received the award in 2003 for her work titled Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, which also drew on collections from the Hoover Archives.
Click the following link to see Robert Service discussing Trotsky on Uncommon Knowledge.
