Dresden

Few rulers can have rejoiced in a less appropriate sobriquet than Augustus the Strong

5 October 2024 9:00 am

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

21 February 2020 10:00 pm

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

15 February 2020 9:00 am

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

7 February 2020 10:00 pm

A conversation between Sinclair McKay and A.N. Wilson

How The Satanic Verses failed to burn

28 May 2016 9:00 am

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

21 November 2015 9:00 am

On 14 November 1940, at seven in the evening, the Luftwaffe began to bomb Coventry. The skyline turned red like…

Dresden’s Striezelmarkt dates back to 1434

What's so special about German Christmas markets

7 November 2015 9:00 am

Why the fuss about German Christmas markets? Surely they’re just schmaltzy shanty towns, full of stuff you’d never dream of…

White glazed bowl, Shunzhi-Kangxi period, Qing dynasty, 1650–70

The perils of porcelain – and the pleasures of Edmund de Waal

19 September 2015 8:00 am

A.S. Byatt on the dark, deadly secrets lurking beneath a calm, white surface

Arch enemies: Euston Arch (left), torn down to make way for London’s most miserable train station (right)

Should Euston Arch be raised from the dead?

23 May 2015 9:00 am

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

24 January 2015 9:00 am

As weather bombs brew in the north Atlantic, I’m roughing it by heading off to Rajasthan, and the literary festival…

The undiscovered country: ‘Germany? Where is it?’, asked Goethe and Schiller in a collaborative poem. ‘I don’t know where to find such a place.’ Above: ‘Goethe in the Roman Campagna’, 1787, by Johann Tischbein, currently on show at the British Museum

German history is uniquely awful: that’s what makes it so engrossing

13 December 2014 9:00 am

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?

25 January 2014 9:00 am

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 

26 October 2013 9:00 am

‘I cannot describe to you what a curious note of brutality a bomb has,’ said one woman who lived through…