Nazis
Satirical pulp: The Possessed, by Witold Gombrowicz, reviewed
The 1939 Gothic pastiche which the author was at pains to distance himself from is now considered a delightfully devious work of Polish modernism
Passports out of hell
Roger Moorhouse describes how various diplomats stationed in Europe risked their positions to issue as many forged ‘tickets to safety’ to Jews as possible
Rewriting history
If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was…
A deadly blame game
Alan Philps reveals how many western journalists, duped by Stalinist propaganda, rushed to blame the Nazis for the Soviet atrocity
Chance encounters
The fates of members of a Jewish family depend on accidental meetings, the boarding of a ship or the ring of a phone in this complex fable woven from 20th-century history
Last chance saloon
Florian Illies describes the charged atmosphere of Europe in the early 1930s, as people grew increasingly desperate to celebrate their last chance of freedom
Was it murder?
In a beautifully told novel, O’Callaghan focuses on the mysterious death of the footballer Matthias Sindelar in 1939 – possibly as a result of defying Hitler
Three roled into one
Good, starring David Tennant, needs more dosh spent on it. The former Doctor Who plays John, a literary academic living…
The fate of castaways
Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by…
His own worst enemy
The Radetzky March must be one of the dozen greatest European novels – but its author was frighteningly unpleasant, says Philip Hensher
Nazi on the run
Who would have thought that someone would write a novel about Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor and infamous experimenter on…
Hiding in plain sight
Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart…
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,…
Man and superman
The creation of a master race is an ancient idea which, thankfully, can never work, says Sam Leith
Into the woods
The extent of Walt Disney’s grasp of the natural world remains unclear. After the Austrian author Felix Salten sold the…
Neville’s advocate
Nigel Jones talks to the writer Robert Harris about Blair, Johnson and Polanski, cancel culture and his quest to rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain
Dutch courage
The Forgotten Battle is a Dutch feature film commemorating the desperate and relatively little-known Allied assault on the Scheldt estuary…
Speed and stealth
Fast boats and fast women have been the ruin of many a poor boy. But they can also prove a…
A script to raise whirlwinds
Boy meets girl. Girl gets pregnant. Then the entire world collapses. That’s the story of Camp Siegfried, which is set…
Blood is thicker than water
In Traitor King, Andrew Lownie shows how the Duke of Windsor — the former Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936…
Unheeded warnings
In 1928, a modest young lecturer from Wilwaukee, Mildred Harnack, née Fish, arrived in Berlin to begin her PhD in…
The book as narrator
It is a truism that a book needs readers in order to have a meaningful existence. Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages…
An open or shut case?
Writers of memoirs are often praised for their honesty — but how do we know? I found I did believe…
A moving target
‘They’ll slowly undress us first and then kill us, so our clothes won’t get bloody and our banknotes won’t get…
Wealth and misfortune
The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo.…
