Oppenheimer’s passenger
Christopher Nolan and Cormac McCarthy’s fissile Westerns
World war two
Sunday
Monday
Russian failure is a lesson for America
Ideological obedience is toxic to merit, innovation and military risk taking
Sunday
Men at War examines homosexuality among World War Two soldiers
Luke Turner’s essential thesis is that the war opened up a brief time of sexual liberation for men
Monday
The difficulties of writing historical fiction
Historians ask ‘What?’ Novelists ask ‘What if?’
Saturday
A Winston Churchill Christmas
The British prime minister addressed the American people from the White House eighty-one years ago today
Friday
Eighty years later, World War Two is fading from historical memory
We’re losing touch with its lessons just as they struggled to commemorate the Civil War
Sunday
The prodigal daughter
Mussolini’s Daughter: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe by Caroline Moorehead reviewed
Friday
The myth that Hiroshima was necessary
The ‘we had no choice’ excuse has had twenty-first century consequences
Monday
Berlin as the unreal city
A new book makes you ask, somewhat apprehensively, what will happen there next
Thursday
Carry on regardless
The Twilight World by Werner Herzog reviewed
Monday
Et in Arcadia ego
Interwar Oxford was less a world of dreaming spires and more one of constipated poets
Friday
Peace and its consequences in Ukraine
The Second Cold War that the Western world never wanted is already here
Wednesday
The history of the American Memorial Chapel
The Chapel is dedicated to the 28,000 American people who were stationed on British soil and died in World War Two
Tuesday
How Hitler’s great gamble nearly paid off
The Hitler Years: Disaster, 1940-1945 by Frank McDonough reviewed
Thursday
In search of Nirad Chaudhuri
The forgotten visionary of British India
Sunday
Gibraltar rocks on
Gibraltar is no longer a colonial outpost. It feels modern, cosmopolitan
Sunday
A tinpot Caesar
Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse, 1935-1943 by John Gooch reviewed
Tuesday
My debt to Royaumont
A Spanish flag flew on the palace to protect it from the occupying Germans
Sunday
The doctor’s dilemma
Talking Until Nightfall: Remembering Jewish Salonica, 1941-44 by Isaac Matarasso reviewed
Wednesday
Pigeons are the solution to the statue controversy
Let ’ s kill two birds with one stone
