History books can be historic events, making history by ending important arguments. They can make it impossible for any intellectually honest person to assert certain propositions that once enjoyed considerable currency among people purporting to care about evidence.

The author of one such book, Robert Conquest, an Englishman who spent many years at Stanford's Hoover Institution, has died at 98, having outlived the Soviet Union that he helped to kill with information.

Historian, poet, journalist and indefatigable controversialist, Conquest was born when Soviet Russia was, in 1917, and in early adulthood he was a communist.