"I love the Red Army greatcoat", in the second notebook, contains echos of Tyutchev's poem "I love the sea". Taking contemporary propaganda from Soviet books, magazines and radio and placing it in exotic contexts, he deconstructed it and subordinated it to universal forms. Watching his guards read Pushkin and seeing Pushkin celebrated in the midst of terror, he wrote his "Stanzas" on the 1935 May Day parade, comparing the rapture of the festival with nature and storm, and referring back to Pushkin's "Stanzas" in praise of his tormentor Tsar Nicholas.Mandelstam's poems of his last winter in Voronezh - "This slow asthmatic vastness", "The deadliness of the plains", "Into the face of the frost" - describe shadows, waning powers and his last love, Natasha Shtempel In 1938 he was re-arrested. Sentenced to five years' hard labour, he died later that year in a Siberian transit-camp.Richard McKane has gained from Mandelstam's rhythms in his own poetry, and the clear translation, with its musical assonance and internal rhyme, subtly emphasises other sonic and semantic connections, laying stress on form and making it felt while keeping Mandelstam's clarity, his lightheartedness, his harmony between form and content.The notes following the poems should be read as a separate but essential part of the works. The notebooks end with the letter Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote to her husband in Siberia in the autumn of 1938, days before his death.

Making and distributing copies of everything, she learnt by heart everything her husband wrote, repeating his words to herself through the night, with no confidence until 1956 that his works would ever be published. Since his complete works appeared in 1987, Russians have read his poems to stay alive, absorbing his images as a key to Russia's future, storing his poems as sandbags against disaster.. WHEN the radioactivity from Chernobyl was spewing out over Europe in April 1986, a man in a white coat was stopping passers-by in the West End and waving a Geiger counter over them. After listening to its clicks, he would solemnly assure the London office workers and foreign tourists that they had not received a lethal dose of radiation He was, unfortunately, a complete sham. The Geiger counter was borrowed from a university lab and his only scientific qualification was a failed O-Level in Chemistry. He, or rather I, was engaged in a magazine stunt to test the public's gullibility It was very gullible It still is. An annual 95,000 people patronise the visitor centre at Sellafield to learn how nuclear energy is bringing about a heaven upon earth.

Doubtless a large display is devoted to the occasion in 1983 when its radioactive excretions caused miles of Cumbrian beaches to be cordoned off. It turned out that I was not the only liar around when Chernobyl was putting out at least 100 times more radioactivity than the Hiroshima bomb. The Russian government was defiantly asserting that the situation was well in hand. Even British officials were poo-pooing fears about the radioactive rain splashing down on Welsh sheep farms. It wasn't their mistake, but they still felt obliged to play down the nuclear disaster.If, like Jeremy Hall's Real Lives, Half Lives, you start the clock in 1896 when Becquerel (as in becquerels of radioactivity) noticed that a lump of uranium could fog a photographic plate, the world has had its first nuclear century It has not been a good 100 years Nuclear energy has turned out to be an expensive disaster.