French resistance
Fight or flight?: 33 Place Brugmann, by Alice Austen, reviewed
Residents of a sedate apartment block in Brussels react in very different ways to the Nazi invasion of Belgium in 1940
The troublesome idealism of Simone Weil
Hailed as ‘an uncompromising witness to the modern travails of the spirit’ , Weil also exasperated those closest to her with her ambitions for heroic self-denial
From the Gauls to the Gilets Jaunes
Philip Hensher is enthralled by Graham Robb’s evocative new history of France
The war in the shadows
When in 1941 Winston Churchill famously declared that the newly formed Special Operations Executive, set up to encourage resistance movements,…
A woman in the shadows
When Catherine Dior, one of the heroic French Resistance workers captured by the Nazis, came face to face with her…
Resistance and reprisal
Published to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Vercors, perhaps the most famous stand of the French Resistance…
Recent crime fiction
Stuart MacBride’s new novel, A Song for the Dying (HarperCollins, £16.99, Spectator Bookshop, £14.99), is markedly darker in tone than…
A dogged opportunist
Of a dashing political rival, François Mitterrand once remarked: He was more intelligent than I was, he thought faster than…
