Wilfred Owen’s troubling obsession with young boys
This year is the centenary of the Armistice to end what Siegfried Sassoon called ‘the world’s worst wound’: the first…
A decade of famine and purges: the murderous 1930s under Stalin
He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler.…
Holidays with Hitler
We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic…
Richard III: a bad man — and even worse king
When archaeologists unearthed the battered mortal remains of King Richard III beneath a council car park in Leicester in 2012,…
What drove Europe into two world wars?
Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and…
Rid of their enemies, the Caesars set about murdering family and friends
According to Francis Bacon, the House of York was ‘a race often dipped in its own blood’. That being so,…
John Freeman: polymath or psychopath?
They don’t make Englishmen like the aptly named John Freeman any more. When he died last Christmas just shy of…
Joseph Goebbels: Hitler’s ‘little doctor’ was devoted unto death
It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day…
The knives come out of the cabinet in Churchill’s wartime government
Coalitions, as David Cameron has discovered, are tricky things to manage. How much more difficult, then, was it for Winston…
From prince to pauper: a dramatic overview of Britain on 18 June 1815
Of all the big battalions of books marking the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo that have come my way,…
Game of thrones: five kings spanning five centuries launch a new series on royalty
It is a strange paradox of our egalitarian age that a progressive publisher like Penguin should commission — at considerable…
Terror plots, threats to liberties, banks in crisis: welcome to Britain during the Napoleonic Wars
In our own troubled times it is useful and comforting to recollect that ’twas ever thus. Violent threats against prominent…
From slaves' rectums to porn vids, there are few places people haven't tried to conceal secret messages
John Gerard, a Jesuit priest immured in the Tower of London in 1597, and tortured by being hung from manacles…
The one-man spy factory who changed history
With two new biographies of Kim Philby out, an espionage drama by Sir David Hare on BBC2, and the recent…
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