Lucy Lethbridge

The village of Oberstdorf lies in the Bavarian Alps, geographically remote but, as this gripping book demonstrates, deeply etched by the politics and violence of the Third Reich. Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel have used diaries, letters, newspaper reports and the official papers of Oberstdorfers as a lens through which to look at the rise of Nazism in Germany. The result is a fascinating and often surprisingly discordant cacophony of experiences. Oberstdorf was a small village but it had a wide range. By the early 1920s it was a favoured tourist spot: its population of 4,000 was swelled to 9,000 by visitors who came for health cures and winter sports. There were several hotels, a cable car, a cinema and a sanatorium.

Georgina Landemare cooked for the Churchill family in all their kitchens, during the 1930s and 1940s. She got as close to the inner workings of the prime ministerial stomach as it was possible to get for a non-family member. At Admiralty House, Chartwell, Chequers, Downing Street and even in the hastily put-up fitted kitchen in the Cabinet War Rooms, she eked out the rations into seven-course meals and accommodated both Churchill’s gluttony and his fussiness. There seem to have been plovers’ eggs in abundance. The food historian Annie Gray’s previous books include an examination of the life of Queen Victoria through that monarch’s enormous, indiscriminate appetite for eating.