Stephen May’s Sell Us The Rope is a new novel about the London congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party of 1907. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Rosa Luxemburg play leading roles in the story. I know: it sounds great. But before you click on ‘Buy Now’ on Amazon, let me tell you a bit more. The book’s premise — that Stalin was a long-term, paid informer for the tsarist secret police (the Okhrana) — made the story especially interesting for me. The fact that it had a positive review in the New York Times — that was icing on the cake.