Have you ever wondered who the evilest people to ever walk this earth are? Adolf Hitler always seems to be the go-to reference in such conversations. It is a difficult thing to quantify. Do we do it statistically — that…

“All I know,” the British socialist Beatrice Webb confided in her diary in 1932 as she and her husband Sidney were writing a laudatory two-volume history of the Soviet Union, “is that I wish Russian communism to succeed.” The playwright…