Hitler

What do we mean when we talk about freedom?

12 October 2024 9:00 am

When the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder was 14, his parents took him to Costa Rica, a country…

The futility of ever hoping to give peace a chance

27 July 2024 9:00 am

After 400 generations of martial conflict on Earth, mankind now faces the prospect of wars in space, as China and America vie for mastery of the heavens

When Stalin was the lesser of two evils

8 June 2024 9:00 am

Churchill detested Stalin, but Britain and the US needed his help against an even worse enemy. Giles Milton reveals the true nature of the Big Three’s dysfunctional relationship

The circus provides perfect cover for espionage

27 April 2024 9:00 am

As he flew his plane between circus acts across Germany in the 1930s, Cyril Bertram Mills gained vital aerial intelligence about the Nazis’ rearmament programme

Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings of Renaud Camus, reviewed

11 November 2023 9:00 am

The French writer does not accept that all incomers to his country can be truly ‘French’, and considers the dramatic change of population an unprecedented disaster

Set in a silver sea: the glory of Britain’s islands

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Alice Albinia reminds us that Orkney was a trading station long before London, Iona the epicentre of Celtic Christianity and Shetland a haven for liberal Udal law

Out of the shadows

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Unlike his attention-seeking brother David Stirling, Bill was a careful planner, responsible for many successful intelligence-gathering operations behind enemy lines

Looking on the bright side

7 October 2023 9:00 am

The Rochdale lass who sang her way from music hall to the silver screen encouraged a spirit of resilience and community in the interwar years, says Simon Heffer

A doomed democracy

26 August 2023 9:00 am

Despite its democratic ideals and artistic creativity, 1920s Germany lacked both the flexibility and social cohesion necessary for functional politics, says Frank McDonough

What, if anything, have dictators over the centuries had in common?

15 July 2023 9:00 am

Simon Kuper finds little to connect the strongmen of the past and present apart from their contempt for their own supporters

The Anne Frank story continues

1 July 2023 9:00 am

Hannah Pick-Goslar, a survivor of the Holocaust and Anne’s friend in Amsterdam, movingly describes their snatched conversations in Belsen before Anne disappeared forever

Was Mussolini’s wilful daughter his éminence grise?

22 October 2022 9:00 am

In 1930, when she was 19 years old, Edda Mussolini married Galeazzo Ciano. His father was a loyal minister in…

The Osnabrück witch trials echo down the centuries

8 October 2022 9:00 am

Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by…

The roots of 20th-century German aggression

1 October 2022 9:00 am

It is the contention of Peter Wilson, professor of the history of war at Oxford University and the author of…

The nondescript house that determined the outcome of the second world war

27 August 2022 9:00 am

Sometimes the struggle for a single small strongpoint can tip the whole balance of a greater battle. One thinks of…

Bitter harvest – how Ukraine’s wheat has always been coveted

16 April 2022 9:00 am

Publishers love books with ambitious subtitles such as ‘How Bubblegum Made the Modern World’, and this one’s, about American wheat…

Are cancel-culture activists aware of their sinister bedfellows?

2 April 2022 9:00 am

Is there a woke case to be made for freedom of expression? Jacob Mchangama certainly seems to think so. This…

The joy of French car boot sales

26 February 2022 9:00 am

Every Saturday morning Michael rises at four and drives down to the Côte d’Azur to the Magic World car boot…

The secret life of Thomas Mann: The Magician, by Colm Tóibín, reviewed

18 September 2021 9:00 am

In a letter to Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika sight unseen in order to…

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was lucky to escape retribution in 1945

11 September 2021 9:00 am

They rather like bad boys, the French. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is one, in a tradition that stretches from François Villon…

Chips Channon’s judgment was abysmal, but the diaries are a great work of literature

11 September 2021 9:00 am

It is often said that the best political diaries are written by those who dwell in the foothills of power.…

Nazis and Nordics: the latest crime fiction reviewed

14 August 2021 9:00 am

Social historians of the future may look back at the reading habits of this era and conclude that we were…

The uncomfortable truth about the Nazis and the Olympics

24 July 2021 9:00 am

The uncomfortable truth about the Nazis and the Olympics

Tala Halawa and the progressive media’s anti-Semitism blindspot

24 May 2021 9:57 pm

The tale of Tala Halawa has an ever-mounting horror to it: each sentence is more disturbing than the last. First…

Arthur Bryant: monstrous chronicler of Merrie England

22 May 2021 9:00 am

If you want to judge how much society has changed, you might do worse than visit a few secondhand bookshops.…