Nigel Jones

He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler. He had webbed toes, a grey face pitted by smallpox, a stunted arm, soft voice, yellowish eyes and an awkward rolling walk. He swore like a trooper, smoked a pipe, drank the sweet wines of

We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic turn, but the diary of Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, a former chief of British Naval Intelligence and fanatical admirer of Nazi Germany, proves otherwise. Domvile’s description of his visit to Himmler’s ‘hunting box’ high in

Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is a memorial raised by the Protestant Alliance in 1870 commemorating the men and women who died agonisingly nearby, roasted alive for refusing to abjure their new-found reformed religion. Nimble intellectual footwork was needed across the

It is easy to see why the bare century of the Tudor dynasty’s rule has drawn so much attention from contemporary women historians. Without breaking sweat, I can think of at least ten — four of whom garland this book with advance praise — who have written biographies or studies of the Welsh upstarts, leaving

Until it was overtaken by the still more disastrous debacle in Iraq, the Suez Crisis of 1956 was widely judged to be Britain’s worst postwar foreign blunder. Not only, to use Talleyrand’s phrase, a crime, but an error of monumental proportions. The deceitful plot by Britain and France, in secret collusion with Israel, to invade

In this centenary year of the Somme, it is refreshing to read a book about the Great War that is not yet another dreary recital of the tragic and over-familiar facts, but successfully gets to grips with the dilemmas facing the commanders and politicians mediating the gargantuan conflict. Historical debate about the war now boils

When archaeologists unearthed the battered mortal remains of King Richard III beneath a council car park in Leicester in 2012, they not only made the historical find of the century (so far) but unleashed a veritable frenzy of media attention on a ruler already the most notorious in English history. A stream of books, articles

Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and Nemesis. He is now attempting to repeat the feat with a two-volume history of modern Europe, of which this is the opening shot.Inevitably, the figure of the Führer once again marches across Kershaw’s pages as

According to Francis Bacon, the House of York was ‘a race often dipped in its own blood’. That being so, one wonders what Bacon made of Rome’s Julio-Claudian dynasty, the gore-spattered family that gave the empire its first five rulers, and the subject of Tom Holland’s latest popular history of the ancient world. Recounting one

They don’t make Englishmen like the aptly named John Freeman any more. When he died last Christmas just shy of his centenary, the obituaries — once they had expressed astonishment that this titan from the age of Attlee and empire had still been around —paid tribute to a polymath whose achievements could fill nine more

It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day of a general election filled with Joseph Goebbels’s hallmarks: mendacity, media manipulation and the big lie. Seventy years after the spectacular suicide of Goebbels and his wife Magda, and their murder of their six children,

Coalitions, as David Cameron has discovered, are tricky things to manage. How much more difficult, then, was it for Winston Churchill as he struggled to survive, then win, a world war, while at the same time managing his fractious three-party administration at home. In this scholarly, yet grippingly readable study of the wartime coalition, Jonathan

Of all the big battalions of books marking the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo that have come my way, this has to be the best. David Crane has used the bloody campaign as a telescope, bringing into sharp focus not just the carnage along the Brussels road, but the state of Britain itself: a

It is a strange paradox of our egalitarian age that a progressive publisher like Penguin should commission — at considerable expense, since the series editor Simon Winder has netted some top academic authors — brief lives of all 44 English, and later British, monarchs, from Athelstan to his distant descendent, our own Queen Elizabeth. The

In our own troubled times it is useful and comforting to recollect that ’twas ever thus.  Violent threats against prominent politicians? Jenny Uglow reminds us that in 1802 Colonel Edward Despard, a British officer turned radical agitator, was the last person in England to be sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, for a plot

John Gerard, a Jesuit priest immured in the Tower of London in 1597, and tortured by being hung from manacles until he temporarily lost the use of his arms, was a resourceful as well as courageous fellow. Dependent on the kindness of his jailer, a warder named Bonner, for such intimacies as washing, dressing and

Today, 23 April, the world celebrates the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s presumed birth (and marks with less joy the date of the Bard’s death in 1616). That double date obscures another: the 99th anniversary of the death of a less celebrated Warwickshire-born literary lad, the poet Rupert Brooke. Brooke, like many of his friends

With two new biographies of Kim Philby out, an espionage drama by Sir David Hare on BBC2, and the recent revelation that the aristocrat superspy John Bingham was the model for George Smiley, there is little doubt that Britain is currently going through one of its fitful bouts of spy fever, and this book can

Wilfred Owen, the poet whose work epitomises the horror of the First World War for most people in modern Britain, was born in Oswestry in the Shropshire Marches, close to his Welsh ancestral homeland, one hundred and twenty-one years ago today. His brief life ended just a quarter of a century later, on November 4th