In the May issue of New English Review, our bookish doctor covers the brutal communist regime of Albania’s Enver Hoxha and how it allowed its most famous writer, Ismail Kadare, to continue writing.

The strangest contradiction about Albania was that it was the home to one of the greatest of European writers of the epoch, Ismail Kadare, who would surely be a worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize (unlike some others who have recently received it).