Second world war
Going underground
Leaf Arbuthnot and Igor Toronyi-Lalic on the new cultural rebels
Winging it
We won the Battle of Britain – just
Going through the motions
Resistance stars Jesse Eisenberg and tells the true story of how mime artist Marcel Marceau helped orphaned Jewish children to…
Wartime romance
Sentimentalising the Blitz is hardly ‘Blitz spirit’
A tinpot Caesar
Mussolini dreamed of a new Roman empire and dominion over the Mediterranean. Two decades later he was hanging by his feet in a public square, as Ian Thomson relates
My grandfather, the hero
In tough times, people often discover their dauntlessness
A soldier’s life
First shown on BBC Scotland, Harry Birrell Presents Films of Love and War (BBC4, Wednesday) was the documentary equivalent of…
Was the bombing of Dresden a war crime?
A conversation between Sinclair McKay and A.N. Wilson
From hell to heaven
One of the many astonishing things about the BBC2 drama The Windermere Children (Monday) was that the real-life story it…
Two books that made me forget everything else
Gstaad I’ve been hitting the books rather hard lately, the ritzy-glitzy crowd having gone the way of natural snow. There’s…
A soldier’s legacy: how a baby’s cry saved a family
It was early evening on Sunday 6 August 1944. The Allies’ bloody struggle to liberate Normandy from the Nazis had…
A solid costume drama but Dame Helen has been miscast: Catherine the Great reviewed
It’s possibly not a great sign of a Britain at ease with itself that the historical character most likely to…
Enjoyably contrived: BBC1’s Baptiste reviewed
What’s the best way to start a six-part thriller? The answer, it seems, is to have a bloke of a…
Like getting Banksy to repaint the Sistine Chapel: Sky Atlantic’s Das Boot reviewed
‘I know, let’s repaint the Sistine Chapel. But this time we’ll get it done by Banksy.’ Perhaps this wasn’t the…
The man who never cried
It was odd listening to Jim Al-Khalili being interviewed on Radio 4 on Tuesday morning rather than the other way…
Intelligent, unfussy, literate – the West End needs more plays like this: Switzerland reviewed
I know nothing about Patricia Highsmith. The acclaimed American author wrote the kind of Sunday-night crime thrillers that put me…
France’s second world war shame
The monument to this French village’s war dead is a plain white stone block with the head of a grizzled…
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…
The dumbing down of the Reith Lectures
It’s been a heavyweight week on Radio 4 with the start of the annual series of Reith Lectures and a…
Were all those young lives lost at Normandy in vain?
I’m back in New York and digesting the five glorious days spent in Normandy. What was the fighting all about,…
The other side of D-Day
Omaha Beach, Normandy I am standing in a German cement bunker having walked through a large gaping hole caused by…
Andrew Roberts’s guide to Churchill on screen
Gary Oldman has joined a long list of actors who have portrayed Winston Churchill — no fewer than 35 of…
A non-sniggering look at the latest developments in the lucrative sex-robot market
This week on Channel 4, we watched a cheery 58-year-old American engineer called James going on a first date. He…
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…
Rarely has the West End seen such a draining and nasty experience: The Exorcist reviewed
The Exorcist opened in 1973 accompanied by much hoo-ha in the press. Scenes of panic, nausea and fainting were recorded…
