Hitler
The circus provides perfect cover for espionage
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
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
Island queendom
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
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
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
Despite its democratic ideals and artistic creativity, 1920s Germany lacked both the flexibility and social cohesion necessary for functional politics, says Frank McDonough
The ruling passion
Simon Kuper finds little to connect the strongmen of the past and present apart from their contempt for their own supporters
Across the wire at Belsen
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
‘As capricious as a wild mare’
In 1930, when she was 19 years old, Edda Mussolini married Galeazzo Ciano. His father was a loyal minister in…
The fate of castaways
Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by…
The roots of German militarism
It is the contention of Peter Wilson, professor of the history of war at Oxford University and the author of…
Heroes of the siege
Sometimes the struggle for a single small strongpoint can tip the whole balance of a greater battle. One thinks of…
The crop of gold
Publishers love books with ambitious subtitles such as ‘How Bubblegum Made the Modern World’, and this one’s, about American wheat…
Deathly silencing
Is there a woke case to be made for freedom of expression? Jacob Mchangama certainly seems to think so. This…
Low life
Every Saturday morning Michael rises at four and drives down to the Côte d’Azur to the Magic World car boot…
Mann’s secret desires
In a letter to Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika sight unseen in order to…
In the heart of the night
They rather like bad boys, the French. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is one, in a tradition that stretches from François Villon…
Always entertaining
It is often said that the best political diaries are written by those who dwell in the foothills of power.…
Nordics and Nazis
Social historians of the future may look back at the reading habits of this era and conclude that we were…
Game changer
The uncomfortable truth about the Nazis and the Olympics
Tala Halawa and the progressive media’s anti-Semitism blindspot
The tale of Tala Halawa has an ever-mounting horror to it: each sentence is more disturbing than the last. First…
Monstrous conceit
If you want to judge how much society has changed, you might do worse than visit a few secondhand bookshops.…
A necessary evil
Of the two dictators who began the second world war as allied partners in crime but ended it in combat…
More gossip and scandal
Chips Channon was conceited, snobbish, disloyal, voyeuristic and wrongheaded – all qualities most helpful to a great diarist, says Craig Brown
No, Spike Lee: Donald Trump is not like Hitler
I wish people would stop comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. Not because I’m worried about Trump’s feelings — he’s…
