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: How to make a cup of tea
No defence Sir: Jon Stone (Letters, 15 February) recalls the horrors and miseries of being subjected to bombing from the…
Letters: Britain can be zero carbon – but only by becoming poorer
A green and poor land? Sir: Your editorial (8 February) is a timely warning about what the government’s headlong drive…
Did Britain commit a war crime in Dresden? A conversation
A conversation between Sinclair McKay and A.N. Wilson
How The Satanic Verses failed to burn
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…
What's so special about German Christmas markets
Why the fuss about German Christmas markets? Surely they’re just schmaltzy shanty towns, full of stuff you’d never dream of…
The perils of porcelain – and the pleasures of Edmund de Waal
A.S. Byatt on the dark, deadly secrets lurking beneath a calm, white surface
Should Euston Arch be raised from the dead?
Yes William Cook Rejoice! Rejoice! Fifty-four years after its destruction, Euston Arch has returned to Euston. Well, after a fashion.…
Tom Holland’s diary: Fighting jihadism with Mohammed, and bowling the Crown Prince of Udaipur
As weather bombs brew in the north Atlantic, I’m roughing it by heading off to Rajasthan, and the literary festival…
German history is uniquely awful: that’s what makes it so engrossing
As I grew up half German in England in the 1970s, my German heritage was confined to the few curios…
Leipzig and Dresden are both staging Elektra. Which city wins?
Yet more performances of Elektra, Richard Strauss’s setting of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ramped-up, neurosis-riddled 1903 reworking of Sophocles, are unlikely…
Hitler didn't start indiscriminate bombings — Churchill did
‘I cannot describe to you what a curious note of brutality a bomb has,’ said one woman who lived through…
