I have read the Amis book (and you can probably guess how I came to read it). It is an odd mixture of the personal and the political -- my suggested title for it is "Stalin 'n' Me"--although a great deal of the political is basically a crib of Solzhenitsyn (who is vastly entertaining). Where he's a little more original is in his slagging of the British left and their longstanding commie dupedom. I enjoyed the book, cause MA is an entertaining writer, but it didn't tell me too much about Uncle Joe, the kindly, smiling leader and teacher of the working people of the world, that I didn't already know from The Gulag Archipelago...

Quibble: Though Charlie lives in Edinburgh, I doubt he'd agree with the label ``Scottish''.
His family live in Yorkshire iirc, to which his grandparents(?) immigrated from the Continent.