normandy
What did Britain really gain from the daring 1942 Bruneval raid?
The night-time dismantling of a German radar site in Normandy was a feat of skill, courage and imagination. But there was little improvement to Bomber Command casualties as a result
A long withdrawing roar
England’s final, agonising defeat in the Hundred Years War brings Jonathan Sumption’s monumental history to a close. David Crane salutes 43 years of research and writing
Escape from drudgery
Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village…
‘I think I’ve found a real paradise’
Martin Gayford talks to David Hockney about life in the Norman countryside under quarantine, how the iPad is better than paint and brush, and why he is not a communist
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…
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,…
Dispatch from Pegasus Bridge, Normandy
Pegasus Bridge, Normandy We’re taking morning coffee at the Café Gondrée, which skirts the bridge. It still belongs to…
Normandy
I am compiling a list of the best black puddings. It began in Spain when I encountered my first morcilla…
Just sign here…
This being the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, it is not surprising that there should be two…
D-Day Notebook
The phrase ‘ring of steel’ hardly begins to describe the operation here in Calvados country as we await the 70th…
A boy on a bicycle
In Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, the efforts of an academic claque propel the mysterious German author Benno von Archimboldi onto…
Letters
EU diplomacy Sir: Lord Lamont’s article ‘The EU’s scandalous new army of overpaid diplomats’ (Politics, 20 July) revisits his oft-repeated…
Notes on…Normandy
There are some, I know, who for whom Normandy means the three Cs — cider, cream and calvados. But if,…
