SOURCE: Marsden, Philip. “Sweet are the Uses of Diversity.” Spectator 271, no. 8630 (4 December 1993): 44.

In the following review, Marsden offers a positive assessment of Exit into History: A Journey through the New Eastern Europe, calling the work “profound and provocative.”

The re-emergence of Eastern Europe used to be such a simple issue. The communists were gone, and everyone was free to be like us. Accustomed to seeing those beyond the Iron Curtain as somehow homogenous, we expected them to become free uniformly as well.

But they haven't. Difference has become the antidote to ideology. For comprehension we must now wade through a mire of proto-democrats, turncoat communists, neo-fascists, gun-wielding nationalists and mafia hoods. To look for clues in towns from the Baltic to the Black Sea is to be met with a barrage of discordant voices: street traders, currency touts, buskers, guitar-playing Christians, swaying followers of Hare Krishna, purring BMWs...