The book vividly portrays the difficulties encountered by a young intellectual trying to shape himself under the oppressive Ceausescu regime and provides a stark depiction of a man's intellectual suffocation under hard-line socialist rule. The book's overall significance is therefore far more wideranging than just Romania or the 1980s.

    They drank wine in Transylvanian forests and, avoiding the Securitate, camped together beneath the Carpathian moon. When she returned home, George wrote her letters criticising the Romanian regime, and asked her to marry him and to help him escape. Abruptly the letters stopped. After the revolution in 1989 Helena Drysdale returned to Romania, a country trapped in a labyrinth of post-Communist paranoia, in search of George.

    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

    This account of Romania's changing allegiance and its part in World War II draws on details from the recently opened archives. Details chart: the relationships between Romania and other Axis powers; the importance of Romania to Hitler, its operational record; the international coup d'etat and liberation; and the change to support the Allied cause. The authors also provide full coverage of the personalities, weaponry and orders of battle.