I don't believe that the widow of that very brave man Victor Serge can have been an orthodox Communist. (Serge was one of the people who put me on the right track with respect to Bombacci and Mussolini, although he didn't see how the pieces added up.) And now I remember rather better what I thought of her work. I thought that her attempt to de-historicize the appalling track record of the Aztecs and their predecessors was doomed from the start, but that she nevertheless made a very interesting job of drawing out what might have lain behind the atrocities.