Preserving A Great Scholar’s Legacy

• History
• Contemporary
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• World

Mrs. Conquest—christened Elizabeth Anne but known to all by her nickname—is now 75, and she tells me about the letters as she fixes dinner in the modest Stanford apartment she shared with her husband for 33 years, until his death at 98 in August 2015. Her recall for words is startling. Through three hours of conversation she quotes faultlessly from memory—even after a few margaritas. Her devotion to her late husband is evident in everything she says and does.

Robert Conquest was the first historian to chronicle Stalin’s murderous havoc. His book “The Great Terror,” published in 1968, was among the 20th century’s most influential works of investigative history. Yet Conquest was also a seriously accomplished poet and a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence includes letters to Amis and Larkin (880 pages to the latter alone), as well as to the novelist Anthony Powell and poets including D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Vernon Scannell, Wendy Cope and others—not to forget, Mrs. Conquest says, “dear old Margaret,” with whom he struck up a rollicking friendship in the year she became British prime minister. “Oh, and letters to his mother,” Mrs. Conquest adds quickly. “I’ve got postcards and letters to her going back to the late 1930s. His mother kept absolutely everything.”