Hitler
Hitler’s devastating secret weapon: V2, by Robert Harris, reviewed
After Stalingrad, Hitler desperately needed an encouraging novelty. Wernher von Braun, Germany’s leading rocketeer in the second world war, expertly…
Hitler’s admiration has severely damaged Wagner’s reputation
Wagner gripped the communal mind for decades after his death. Philip Hensher examines his enduring influence
Bombs over London: V for Victory, by Lissa Evans, reviewed
Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality.…
Why do monsters make such good writers?
Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters — Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the…
With these documentaries, the BBC has lost any claim to impartiality
Because the rise of the Nazis is a topic so rarely mentioned these days, least of all in schools, the…
What would Jane Austen say about Debrett’s going digital?
Seventy-five years ago on Saturday, the July plot failed. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg placed a bomb in a briefcase…
Where is the rise of neo-Nazism around Europe leading?
‘Why would anyone write a historical study of it?’ asks Gavriel Rosenfeld about the Fourth Reich at the start of…
Hitler’s would-be assassins were, themselves, Nazi war criminals. Why celebrate them?
On 20 July, Germany’s political elite recalls the day in 1944 when Colonel Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg exploded a…
Swept away by Hitler’s charisma: German women gush over the Führer
The distinguished historian Konrad Jarausch’s new book is a German narrative, told through the stories of ordinary people who lived…
From Stalin’s poetry to Saddam’s romances: the terrible prose of tyrants
‘Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect… Reading is love in action.’ Those are…
A chance to see the Moomins’ creator for the genius she really was: Tove Janssons reviewed
Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring…
Lend me your ears
Complaints about the decline and fall of political oratory are nothing new. Back in 1865 a British reporter branded the…
A grand inquisitor
Hidden behind Kensington Palace, in one of London’s smartest streets, there is a grand old house which played a leading…
The German Lion of Africa
What’s going on with book reviews? Here is the Pulitizer prizewinning (for ‘criticism’) Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, on…
The new age of the refugee
After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered…
What the world looked like after my brain haemorrhage
When your mind suddenly goes wonky, you may be the one person who doesn’t realise that there is something wrong…
Potrait of the Week: prisons to be ‘academies’and West to arm Libya
Home In the Queen’s Speech, the government made provision for bills against extremism and in favour of driverless cars, drones,…
How capitalism really works
Deirdre McCloskey has been at work for many years on a huge project: to explain why the world has become…
Save the innocent swastika!
There is a nice row of swastikas at head height in Burlington Gardens, behind the Royal Academy. They are carved…
Close encounters on the starship Enterprise
For a show with a self-proclaimed ‘five-year mission’, Star Trek hasn’t done badly. Gene Roddenberry’s ‘Wagon train to the stars’…
David Astor: the saintly, tormented man who remade the Observer
Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor…
Was Klaus Mann all Thomas Mann's fault?
Thomas Mann, despite strong homosexual emotions, had six children. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1906…
Why must David Cameron insult Oxford, when it gave him so much?
In 2000, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, accused Magdalen College, Oxford, of class bias in failing to…
The Holy Roman Empire has been much maligned
The Holy Roman Empire has been much maligned over the centuries. In fact it worked remarkably well, says Jonathan Steinberg
Ferninand Porsche: from the Beetle to the Panzer tank
The aggressive character of the famous German sports car, in a sort of sympathetic magic, often transfers itself to owner-drivers.…
