HarperCollins, 512pp, £20 When Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space 60 years ago, the KGB wanted to send a bomb with him. The point of the bomb was not that it could be dropped on the US but that, in the event that his Vostok craft came down on foreign soil, Gagarin and his ship could be remotely destroyed. The bomb idea was eventually overruled but, had Gagarin not survived his flight, the world might never have known his name. The same applied to the man who put him in space, Sergei Korolev, whose identity was kept secret until after his death. Korolev, who had been sent to a Siberian gulag where he lost all of his teeth, became the chief engineer of the Soviet space programme, driving through the giant R-7 rocket, the Sputnik satellites and probes to the moon, Mars and Venus. By his desk he kept the battered aluminium mug that had been his only possession in the Siberian camp.
Lola Seaton’s piece on Mark Fisher (The Critics, 22 January) was wonderfully thorough and moving. It managed to articulate, much like Fisher did, the ineffable sense of loss that typifies this late strain of capitalism. This was heightened by Seaton’s poignant references to the human loss that Fisher’s friends expressed at his memorial. With such glowing appraisals of his affecting work and deep sense of purpose, it is little wonder that there is clamour for more of his writing among such a lost generation. I can’t help but feel galvanised when I read Fisher’s work – Seaton’s piece evoked similar feelings, and not merely through association. I hope that in the aftermath of this collective crisis we can mobilise some of the consciousness we’ve lost and so desperately need. The alternative – a return to an acquiescent “normality” – risks setting us back yet another generation, and yet another crisis.