Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman one of the few I should like to recall from the dead. It is a very good exercise for an historian to stray into biography - a field seemingly so similar and yet fundamentally different. Perhaps no historian can really handle individual psychology or make an individual the centre of his book. All the same I think my "Bismarck" is the best on him ever written". Taylor's Bismarck is not the Junker and iron Chancellor but a complicated, urban intellectual, "the clever, sophisticated son of a clever, sophisticated mother, masquerading all his life as his heavy, earthen father". Instead of
New Statesman having meanwhile absorbed "Marxism Today" in 1991. In 1993, the "Statesman" was sued by Prime Minister John Major after it published an article discussing rumours that Major was having an extramarital affair with a Downing Street caterer. Although the action was settled out of court for a minimal sum, the magazine's legal costs almost led to its closure. In 1994, KGB defector Yuri Shvets said that the KGB utilised the "New Statesman" to spread disinformation. Shvets said that the KGB had provided disinformation, including forged documents, to the "New Statesman" journalist Claudia Wright which she used for anti-American and anti-Israel