Dresden
Few rulers can have rejoiced in a less appropriate sobriquet than Augustus the Strong
The 17th-century Elector of Saxony was notoriously vain and incompetent, and his reckless bid for the Polish crown was disastrous for all concerned
Letters
No defence Sir: Jon Stone (Letters, 15 February) recalls the horrors and miseries of being subjected to bombing from the…
Letters
A green and poor land? Sir: Your editorial (8 February) is a timely warning about what the government’s headlong drive…
Was the bombing of Dresden a war crime?
A conversation between Sinclair McKay and A.N. Wilson
Burning passions
This is a book which, as one eyes its lavish illustrations and dips into its elegant prose, looks as if…
Shock and awe in Coventry, 14 November 1940
On 14 November 1940, at seven in the evening, the Luftwaffe began to bomb Coventry. The skyline turned red like…
Christmas markets
Why the fuss about German Christmas markets? Surely they’re just schmaltzy shanty towns, full of stuff you’d never dream of…
A terrible beauty
A.S. Byatt on the dark, deadly secrets lurking beneath a calm, white surface
Restoration drama
Yes William Cook Rejoice! Rejoice! Fifty-four years after its destruction, Euston Arch has returned to Euston. Well, after a fashion.…
Diary
As weather bombs brew in the north Atlantic, I’m roughing it by heading off to Rajasthan, and the literary festival…
In search of the Fatherland
As I grew up half German in England in the 1970s, my German heritage was confined to the few curios…
German double
Yet more performances of Elektra, Richard Strauss’s setting of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ramped-up, neurosis-riddled 1903 reworking of Sophocles, are unlikely…
Ashes to ashes
‘I cannot describe to you what a curious note of brutality a bomb has,’ said one woman who lived through…
