Mr. Ehrenburg is not young, he has no novelty, his style [in "The Fall of Paris"] is patchy, full of borrowed odds and ends, his situations are unconvincing, his interpretations are programmatic and his characters are utterly dead. They are dead because Mr. Ehrenburg seems to have lost or surrendered his originality or the freedom without which it cannot exist. To inject life into his types he makes them "modern." He goes to Malraux, Aragon and Jules Romains for instruction and in the interest of objectivity he sometimes concedes that fascists and reactionaries have, after all, discernibly human motives and that Centrists and Rightists when they betray believe they are acting to save class and country. But this objectivity frequently falls away and we see Mr. Ehrenburg, red and panting, belaboring his enemies with all his might.

Even so, he does them a greater service than his friends...