the second world war
The British Socrates
After vital work for British intelligence during the second world war, why did J.L. Austin devote the rest of his life to considering literally asinine questions?
Men under fire
On its posthumous publication in 1980, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was widely compared with War and Peace. For all…
The secret sharers
In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to…
A phoenix from the ashes
‘Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.’ Albert Einstein’s deft avoidance of the question put to…
In love and war
As Europe descended into chaos, the middle-aged Picasso remained as bullish as ever, says Craig Raine
Bombs over Belfast
Caught outside at the start of a raid in the Belfast Blitz as the incendiary bombs rain down, Audrey looks…
Names, not numbers
If Joseph Stalin was right about one thing it was his assertion that ‘the death of one man is a…
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…
The rebirth of a nation
Lord Macaulay wrote that ‘during the century and a half which followed the Conquest there is, to speak strictly, no…
Courage of the ‘ghetto girls’
‘Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers,’ ran a New York headline in late 1942. That autumn, the Nazi…
Flight from reality
The Autumn of the Ace begins in 1945, as the second world war ends, but both Louis de Bernières and…
Rag-tag heroes
‘Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,/ But he’ll remember, with advantages,/ What feats he did that day.’ Peter…
It’s that man again
Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and the second world war? Since Ian Kershaw…
A fiasco from the start
In carefree days which now seem so distant we used occasionally to take the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry. Docking after a long…
Female partisans played a vital role in fighting fascism in Italy — but it was a thankless task
‘I am a woman,’ Ada Gobetti wrote in a clandestine Piedmont newsletter in 1943: An insignificant little woman, who has…
The Dambusters raid was great theatre — but almost entirely pointless
The great bomber pilot Guy Gibson had a black labrador with a racist name. This shouldn’t matter, except Gibson loved…
Migration in Europe is the ripple effect of the second world war
Two words may pique the reader’s interest on the cover of this timely, panoramic history of Europe by the distinguished…
A stubborn Conservative PM attempting to negotiate with Germany? Not Theresa May but Neville Chamberlain
When lists are compiled of our best and worst prime ministers (before the present incumbent), the two main protagonists of…
Ernst Jünger — reluctant captain of the Wehrmacht
Ernst Jünger, who died in 1998, aged 102, is now better known for his persona than his work. A deeply…
The spectacular suicide mission of the world’s greatest battleship
In April 1945, the Japanese battleship Yamato — the largest and heaviest in history — embarked upon a suicide mission.…
The BBC’s battle for Britain
The camouflage-painted, smoke-blackened entrance to London’s 1940s Broadcasting House, moated with sandbags and battered by bombs, provided its staff with…
Mussolini’s fall from grace
These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with…
Holidays with Hitler
We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic…
Heroines of the Soviet Union
Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to…
One of history’s saddest chapters
One afternoon in the early 1990s, an elderly gentleman from Alicante told me of the tragedy that had occurred at…
