Why Ukrainians fear the Russians
The Ukrainian word ‘Holodomor’ meaning ‘death by hunger’ is not as well known in the West as the word ‘Holocaust’…
How Putin is following Hitler’s playbook
Like many rulers of Russia before him, especially Stalin, Vladimir Putin is a keen student of History. Judging by his…
Get well soon, your Majesty
The news that the Queen had tested positive for Covid must have sent a shiver of dread down the spines…
Boris vs the Blob: the real reason John Major can’t stand the PM
The embattled denizens of Downing Street must be quaking in their loafers as another incoming missile streaks in. This one…
Are Tory MPs too ‘frit’ to bin Boris?
Boris Johnson is in the midst of the bleakest period of his premiership, but he can at least nibble on a…
Autocrat and autodidact
The link between mass-murdering dictators and the gentle occupation of reading and writing books is a curious one, but it…
Neville’s advocate
Nigel Jones talks to the writer Robert Harris about Blair, Johnson and Polanski, cancel culture and his quest to rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain
Witching times
In the three centuries between 1450 and 1750 in Europe it is estimated that up to 100,000 women were burned,…
A necessary evil
Of the two dictators who began the second world war as allied partners in crime but ended it in combat…
Apocalypse then
Tragically, the current pandemic lends this sparkling study of London in its most decisive century a grim topicality — for…
It’s that man again
Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and the second world war? Since Ian Kershaw…
A stubborn Conservative PM attempting to negotiate with Germany? Not Theresa May but Neville Chamberlain
When lists are compiled of our best and worst prime ministers (before the present incumbent), the two main protagonists of…
Just a man: Demystifying Napoleon
Who says that the ‘great man’ theory of history is dead? Following hard on the heels of Andrew Roberts’s magnificent…
Ian Kershaw recounts Europe’s recovery from WWII – have the good times run their course?
When I reviewed the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s wrist-breaking history of the last 100 years of Europe, To…
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…
Burning issues
Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is…
The puppet queen
It is easy to see why the bare century of the Tudor dynasty’s rule has drawn so much attention from…
Win some — lose too many
In this centenary year of the Somme, it is refreshing to read a book about the Great War that is…
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,…
The continent in crisis
Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and…
Foaming with much blood
According to Francis Bacon, the House of York was ‘a race often dipped in its own blood’. That being so,…
Polymath or psychopath?
They don’t make Englishmen like the aptly named John Freeman any more. When he died last Christmas just shy of…
The devil’s devoted disciple
It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day…
