Winston churchill

Time was when historical fiction conjured images of ruff collars and doublets, with characters saying ‘Prithee Sir’ a lot. Nowadays, the range of featured period settings has expanded unrecognisably, though a new favourite has emerged – the second world war, where Nazis stand in for nefarious noblemen. The Darkest Winter by Carlo Lucarelli, translated by Joseph Farrell (Open Borders Press, £18.99), is one such addition, though an unusual one. It is set in Bologna in 1944, the vicious period after Italy’s first surrender, Mussolini’s capture and daring escape, and the invasion by Nazi troops to counter the Allies’ advance from the south. The protagonist is named De Luca, a former

At 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, a B-29 bomber called Enola Gay dropped ‘Little Boy’ over Hiroshima. The thermal radiation from the atom bomb was 900 times more searing than the sun. An estimated 118,661 civilians died, horribly. Survivors staggered about with their skin in shreds, their intestines hanging out and their blacked and bleeding faces grotesquely disfigured. Upon hearing the news, President Harry Truman called the bombing ‘the greatest thing in history’. Why the US unleashed the terrible bombs over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, has been much debated ever since. In his excellent short book on the subject, Richard Overy writes: The question asked is

Clarissa Churchill – as she was known until her marriage to Sir Anthony Eden – was brought up in a now vanished privileged world of intellectual, social and political London. In the introduction to his biography, Hugo Vickers provides a valuable roll-call of names. Those still living who knew Clarissa have proved invaluable sources of information, though a note of unconscious humour sometimes slips in – as when Antonia Fraser comments: ‘I was not quite glamorous enough for her’ (‘quite’ being the operative word). Born in 1920, Clarissa began life with the ostensible advantage of being a Churchill, the niece of Winston. In fact this was not the case: her

The words ‘country houses’ immediately make one think of England, yet only five of the 15 featured in this hefty, impressively illustrated book are in Britain. It is a compilation of essays: part histories of various Jewish families, part architectural descriptions and part stories of the chateaux, mansions, villas and, of course, country houses all over Europe, owned and sometimes built by these families. Each chapter is by a different author. The swimming pool was surrounded by such a profusion of lilies that the scent at night was overpowering  These homes had different functions. Some, like that of the German-born painter Max Liebermann, were built as traditional country retreats –

No one should be put off reading Patrick Cockburn’s remarkable biography of his father by its misleading subtitle. ‘Guerrilla journalism’ doesn’t do justice to its subject. The suggestion of irregular warfare from the left underrates Claud Cockburn’s great accomplishments in mainstream politics and journalism and doesn’t begin to embrace the romantic and daring complexity of his life and career. By late 1931, his eyewitness reporting at the start of the Great Depression convinced him that Marx was right Indeed, it is the journalist son’s signal achievement to have surmounted left-wing cliché and written a fascinating and subtle portrait of a paradoxical career. Claud was a mostly loyal child of the

The tramp of lovers marching through our heroine’s bedroom in the first half of Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker almost deafens the reader. But then not for nothing did Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman become known as the alpha courtesan of the 20th century. What is perhaps not so well covered is her decade-long influence on American politics before becoming the United States Ambassador to France under (no, not literally) Bill Clinton. The Hon Pamela Digby was born on 20 March 1920 and brought up quietly in Dorset, riding, hunting and meeting only those her parents (her father was the 11th Baron Digby) considered above the social plimsoll line. Early on she

They came on a small, crowded, leaky boat from Calais towards Dover in seas that could turn from placid to treacherous in an instant, around 30 people seeking sanctuary from persecution, unsure of the welcome they would receive. ‘We were seized by horrible vomitings and most of the party became so dreadfully ill they thought they were dying,’ one of the group, a young mother accompanied by her two children, wrote later. The year was 1620 and quite possibly among the refugees might have been a forebear of Nigel Farage. This small boat, one of many hundreds that crossed the Channel in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was

‘We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime… Any man or state who fights against Nazism will have our aid.’ These words were spoken by Winston Churchill in a BBC radio broadcast to the nation from Chequers on the evening of 22 June 1941. Churchill detested Stalin – but he needed him to destroy Hitler That morning, Operation Barbarossa had begun, with Hitler’s armed forces launching the biggest invasion in modern history into the heart of a country whose very existence Churchill detested: the Soviet Union. This cataclysmic invasion by the Nazi regime, however, created an ally the British leader had never envisioned. For the

The hall was before me like a gigantic shell, packed with thousands and thousands of people. Even the arena was densely crowded. More than 5,600 tickets had been sold. Cyril Bertram Mills started his circus career accompanying his father to European horse fairs in the 1920s. The two of them were soon familiar faces on the German circus scene, travelling between shows to recruit acts for London. The Munich Circus was a particular draw; but sometimes they hired out their circular wooden building to other local acts. The opening quote of this review comes from Adolf Hitler. Mills was at first dismissive of the Munich Nazi party leader, pointing out

There is an obvious problem with trying to judge who ‘won’ a propaganda war. Unlike its physical counterpart, there is virtually no real-world evidence either way, and everyone involved has spent years learning how to spin, manipulate and outright lie about reality to try to shape it into what they want. As a result, it remains the conventional wisdom – among those who think of such things, at least – that despite their eventual and total defeat in the second world war, it was the Nazis who won the propaganda war of their era. Fake letters from dead German soldiers to their parents reported thatthey had survived, deserted and were

Conflict comes highly recommended. Two former chiefs of the defence staff, Generals David Richards and Nicholas Carter, praise it for identifying key lessons from the past appropriate to the future. A former MoD strategic adviser, Sir Hew Strachan, says it will ‘challenge the professional and enlighten the generalist’. The US marine corps general and former secretary of defense James Mattis, ‘the warrior monk’, says it is ‘a clear-sighted assessment of war’s future’. And the late Henry Kissinger called it ‘an exceptional book, written by two absolute masters of their profession’. Kissinger had been General David Petraeus’s champion since the latter’s fall from grace as head of the CIA following the

‘These things start on my birthday – like the Warsaw Uprising – and spoil my day,’ wrote the understandably self-pitying Barking housewife Pat Scott in her diary on the first day of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. ‘And then to spoil it more, Ted [her husband] took his driving test for the second time and failed.’ It is clashes like these, of the personal and humdrum against the political and global, that make David Kynaston’s close surveys of Britain in the second half of the 20th century such fascinating and lively documents. Yes, the world might be about to end, but that was no excuse to spoil Pat’s

‘The boy Stirling is quite mad, quite, quite mad. However, in a war there is often a place for mad people.’ Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was referring to David Stirling, the man largely credited with raising the Special Air Service (SAS) in the summer of 1941. Myth has always surrounded the formation of the SAS and one of the most abiding legends is that it was down to one man alone, David Stirling, whose L Detachment of six officers and 60 men grew into 1SAS. Gavin Mortimer’s vivid and meticulously researched book, 2SAS, does a good deal to redress the balance. It acknowledges the importance – too long overlooked –

It was a vision that President Woodrow Wilson could not resist. The Treaty of Versailles, and the League of Nations founded during the negotiations, were meant not just to end the first world war but all future wars by ensuring that a country taking up arms against one signatory would be treated as a belligerent by all the others. Wilson took his adviser Edward ‘Colonel’ House’s vision of a new world order and careered off with it. Against advice, Wilson attended Versailles in person and let none of his staff in during negotiations Against advice, he attended Versailles in person and let none of his staff in with him during