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ection on Meeting Soviet Man, arguably Clark's worst book and certainly his most compromised, is much too brief, as is McKenna's exploration about where Clark stood vis a vis the Soviet Union. Detailing a three-week sojourn in Moscow and Leningrad in November 1958 with fellow writers Jim Devaney and hardline Communist Party member Judah Waten, the book,

But McKenna's careful reading of Clark's diaries, and of correspondence between Clark and Dymphna, demonstrate that it was impossible for Clark to have been in Bonn on the morning of November 10, 1938.In fact, it was Dymphna who witnessed the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, and it was in Dymphna's letters to Clark, who was not in continental Europe at all but in Oxford, that described the carnage that she had seen. In one of her letters to her wayward husband, Dymphna included an article about the event by Joseph Goebbels to which, years later, Clark referred in his claim to be present in Bonn on November 10, 1938. As Clark's own diary confirms, he did not arrive in Bonn until November 26 -- more than two weeks after Kristallnacht.

o answer his rhetorical question of why could not Clark have simply told the terrible story

hrough Dymphna, McKenna answers that, "most likely Clark, the great historian, needed to be there to make the parable of Kristallnacht more powerful, to draw from the events the great lessons he had undoubtedly drawn". Then McKenna concludes: "In this sense, there was no fabrication."

The impact of Kristallnacht on Clark was, he argues, "genuine and profound, somehow pushing aside the fact that he was not physically present". After pointing out that, just as Clark maintained he could not write about past events unless he visited the places where they physically occurred, so too "he felt he could not speak of the significance of Kristallnacht for his intellectual and spiritual development without having been present".

Then McKenna adds that, in "a lifelong partnership, a couple's separate memories can sometimes become one, and through Dymphna, Clark no doubt felt he was there in Bonn on the morning after Kristallnacht".

Despite McKenna's careful research and his seven years of fine labour, key questions about Clark remain unanswered. Where he stood in relation to communism is one of many. McKenna argues that Clark's "admiration for Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was driven by his conviction that the revolution contained 'the promise of better things for mankind"'. It was for this reason, McKenna says, "that he often attended ceremonies held at the Soviet embassy in Canberra to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution -- not because he was a communist but because he was an idealist"