Nazis
Bear necessity
‘Please look after this bear,’ reads the famous label hanging round Paddington’s neck, and this film does that, admirably, handsomely,…
Mother Courage
Italo Calvino, the Italian arch-fabulist, wrote a foreword to this celebrated wartime diary when it appeared in Italy in 1956.…
Object lessons
What Radio 3 needs is a musical version of Neil MacGregor. The director of the British Museum and now a…
Signifying nothing
Fury is a second world war drama that plays with us viscerally and unsparingly — I think I saw a…
Art from another planet
‘Some day we shall no longer need pictures: we shall just be happy.’ — Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, 1966…
Wood work
The New York-based sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard comes from a long line of Polish and Ukrainian peasant farmers. She was…
The kindness of strangers
It is with a heavy heart that I pick up anything to do with the Holocaust. Not because it’s wearisome…
Cheating history
I was so looking forward to Generation War (BBC2, Saturday) — a three-part drama series covering the second world war…
Vichy from the inside
There can be few characters in modern fiction more unpleasant than Paul-Jean Husson, the narrator in Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le…
Overnight trillionaires
In Germany in 1923 money was losing its value so fast that the state printing works could not keep up.…
The Italian job
During the civil war, the Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing recorded with satisfaction his destructive visit in 1644 to the parish…
