Hitler

Hidden behind Kensington Palace, in one of London’s smartest streets, there is a grand old house which played a leading role in Britain’s victory over Nazi Germany. Today it’s owned by Roman Abramovich, apparently — it seems he paid £90 million for it. But during the second world war, and for a few years thereafter, 8 Kensington Palace Gardens was a secret interrogation centre known as the London Cage. This is where suspected spies (and, later, suspected war criminals) were broken down. Between 1940 and 1948, thousands of German servicemen passed through here, on their way to POW camps (if they were deemed innocent) or prison (if they were guilty).

What’s going on with book reviews? Here is the Pulitizer prizewinning (for ‘criticism’) Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, on this book’s cover: Let me say straight out that if all military histories were as thrilling and well written as Robert Gaudi’s African Kaiser, I might give up reading fiction and literary bio-graphy… Gaudi writes with the flair of a latter-day Macaulay. He sets his scenes carefully and describes naval and military action like a novelist. Leaving aside the extraordinary comparison with Macaulay for the moment, most naval and military novels that I’ve read get the historical detail right. Robert Gaudi’s book is so error-strewn that it would fail to

After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered warmth and blazing beauty of Jamaica have remained with some British West Indians for over half a century of exile. Yet 100 changes will have occurred since they left. Long brooding over the loss of one’s homeland can exaggerate its charm and sweetness. The first mass immigration to British shores occurred in the late 19th century, when Ashkenazim arrived by the thousand after escaping the pogroms in Tsarist Russia. Many changed their names and even their accents. The trappings of orthodoxy — beards, sidelocks — left them vulnerable to anti-Semitic

Amid the shambles that was the Anglo-French campaign in Norway in April and May 1940, a French officer observed that ‘the British have planned this campaign on the lines of a punitive expedition against the Zulus, but unhappily we and the British are in the position of the Zulus’. A month later, many British officers would be pronouncing on French generalship equally tartly during the shambles that was the Fall of France. On the whole it doesn’t do to criticise allies, but soldiers have got to be able to grumble about somebody, and it’s best (at the time, at least) to lay the blame elsewhere than one’s own high command.

It is conventional wisdom in the publishing industry that, despite the old adage, readers do indeed judge books by their covers. So, it seems, do passengers on the No. 29 bus. For a middle-aged man reading Clare Mulley’s The Women Who Flew for Hitler, some of the looks I got made me so uncomfortable that I took to hiding the cover behind a newspaper. So let’s get one thing straight from the beginning: this is not a niche book for Third Reich enthusiasts, nor a seedy excuse to fantasise about women in Nazi uniforms. Do not be put off by the awful title: it is in fact a serious double

There’s a moment in A Boy in Winter where a young Ukrainian policeman has to escort his town’s Jewish population to a churned-up field under the watchful eyes of his new Nazi masters. It’s November 1941 and Mykola has been told that all he has to do is relieve the Jews of their luggage and move them along. He assumes that they know what’s coming to them. In his mind, the Germans are ‘bastards’ but no worse than his former Soviet occupiers, who burned his family’s fields and grain stores as they fled eastwards. So Mykola has deserted the Red Army and joined the auxiliary police under the Germans, the

For one who has, since boyhood, regarded the secondhand bookshop as a paradise of total immersion, it is quite shocking to discover Albatross, an unknown imprint from the English literary past. Before Albatross there was Tauchnitz, the Leipzig firm which for 100 years cornered the market in English language books outside the territories of the British Empire and the USA. One often comes across Tauchnitz and I have two of its editions: a Thomas de Quincey, with a stamp from a circulating library in Lausanne; and a Ruskin, with one from a British club in Portugal. I only keep them as curiosities, because normally I avoid Tauchnitz editions: cheap boards

Go into any high street bookshop and find the European history section. There’s usually a shelf or two on France and about the same on Germany, but the difference between these two categories is apparent straight away. The French stuff spans several centuries, whereas German history is confined to just 12 years. Yes, a lifetime since the death of You-Know-Who, Britons are still obsessed with the Third Reich, and who can blame us? It remains the most bizarre and awful epoch in European history and we’re still reeling from its consequences. What’s less forgivable is our wilful ignorance about anything that came before (my son learnt all about the Nazis

As a child in fascist Italy, Clara Petacci (known as Claretta) was dutifully adoring of Benito Mussolini and the cult of ducismo. She gave the stiff-armed Roman salute while at school (the Duce had declared handshaking fey and unhygienic) and sang the fascist youth anthem ‘Giovinezza’. Her father, the Pope’s personal physician, was a convinced fascist, for whom Mussolini was the incarnation of animal cunning — furbizia — and the manful fascist soul. Claretta herself would have to wait before she met the ‘divine Caesar’. One day in April 1932, while motoring from Rome to the seaside resort of Ostia, she caught sight of her idol behind the wheel of

Seventy years after the Nazi Holocaust, against the background of a rich and varied literature, Laurence Rees has achieved the unexpected: a magisterial book that consolidates what has come before and manages to offer fresh perspectives. With Brexit, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen now centre stage, it also offers a timely reminder of the dangers that are unleashed when the path of demonisation and discrimination is embraced in the name of national well-being. As Primo Levi wrote in 1947, from his own experience, when the ‘unspoken dogma’ of group targeting becomes ‘the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. Like

Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger wants to explain how we got to a world in ‘a pervasive panic… that anything can happen anywhere to anybody at any time’. Everything seems to be spinning out of control, and hatred, racism, violence and lies have become common currency everywhere. Facts have become irrelevant and ‘individuals with very different pasts find themselves herded by capitalism and technology into a common present’. Mishra, an accomplished and well known Indian/English writer, comes from semi-rural India. He is ‘a late comer to modernisation… a step-child of the West’. He explains to his readers the less familiar crisis of ideas in non-western states. He argues that Ayatollah

Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured after Hitler’s army encircled the city in September 1941. I never knew, for example, that if an adult starved for months on a few ounces of bread daily, a sip of soup and very little water — if they were lucky enough to get their daily rations — you couldn’t tell when they were naked whether they were male or female. I wouldn’t have believed that starving parents might eat their dead children, or vice versa; yet 1,500 Leningraders were arrested for cannibalism. When people

There’s a glorious scene in Astrid Lindgren’s first Pippi Longstocking book in which her fearless, freckled heroine strides to the centre of a circus ring and briskly lays out the World’s Strongest Man. Like most of the adults who expect to control her, he quickly learns that his inflated size, age and title are no match for the child’s bold pin-wielding attitude. As a little fan myself in the early 1980s I probably giggled as the strongman toppled. But reading it to my own children this summer I also felt a deep lurch of sadness. The strongman’s name was Adolf, and the book (published in 1945) was written as an

Norman Ohler is rather hard on the Nazis, for compared to what our little group got up to in the late 1960s and 1970s, they were shrinking violets in the drugs department. We smoked cannabis, ate opium and sometimes took strong LSD; lines of uncertain content went up nostrils; and we swallowed countless uppers (speed) and downers (tranquillisers, sleepers for looning on). Speed was amphetamine sulphate. Benzedrine, Dexedrine, Methedrine were the three original brands, in rising strength. Soon there were many other names, including slang: Desoxyn, Durophet, Durophet-M (speed with Mandrax), French Blues, Purple Hearts, Black Bombers. Many were prescribed by doctors who didn’t regard them as outrageously dangerous. I