SOURCE: "Hitler's Understudy," in New Statesman, Vol. 113, No. 2922, March 27, 1987, p. 33.

In the favorable review below, Tonkin discusses Findley's focus on history, historical figures, and nostalgia in Famous Last Words, noting the book's contemporary relevance.

In this century novelists have their own special Valhalla, a place of mirth and luxury to which many are called but few chosen. It would astonish me if Famous Last Words didn't at some stage receive this final accolade: 'soon to be a major motion picture.' What makes it so unmistakably a work of our time is the uncanny sensation that it has already been one.

Published in his native Canada in 1981, Timothy Findley's novel has had to wait for an English edition as a result of what the blurb coyly calls 'legal reasons'. In a multi-national cast that also features Lana Turner, Ezra Pound and Joachim von Ribbentrop, two of its principal...