The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The young Mátyás Rákosi (1892–1971) loved London. The son of a Jewish shopkeeper in southern Hungary, he had made his way there via Hamburg in 1913. Already a socialist, Rákosi had immediately joined the Communist Club in London’s Fitzrovia, whose Hungarian members...
Many congratulations on the Those Must Be The Guards. The title is from the great Sir John Moore during the retreat to Corunna in 1809, who made the remark when noticing the Foot Guards maintaining their discipline when all about had lost theirs. Would a Guards...
I keep overhearing people debating between themselves the comparison of Robert Oppenheimer and Alan Turing, his British near contemporary - Turing was six years younger - who was the originator of modern computing. I feel as if this is also a debate that I ought to...
Congratulations to Julian Jackson, the author of France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Petain, on winning the 2023 Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize. Our editor and part of our board attended an elegant and enjoyable event at the Travellers Club in Pall Mall. The champagne...
Iain, Checkpoint Charlie was your second history book, but your first on the 20th century. What is it about Checkpoint Charlie that fascinates us, nearly 35 years after the Wall came down? For those like me who grew up as teenagers in the 1980s, the Cold War was a...
Michael H. Kater’s After The Nazis is a tremendous study into life and culture in West Germany after World War II up until German Reunification. Throughout the book, Kater sheds light on a side of West Germany’s history that is often overshadowed by its geopolitical...
The Mysterious Death of Joseph Stalin Stalin was feeling weak on account of his unusually high blood pressure. He was also complaining of dizziness. Yet his temper was as fiery as ever on the evening of 28 February 1953. He had invited a few of his closest comrades to...
Well, I don’t know about you, but I thought Jack Miller and Sophia von Naundorf had made it through to peacetime at the end of Agent in Peril. Not a bit of it – they still have their most exciting and dangerous mission before them, and what could be their most...
I thoroughly enjoyed Rule Britannia, the first of a series of cracking historical thrillers set in the 1930s. It features an oddball couple of adventurers, Ernest Drabble, a Cambridge historian and mountaineer, and his old schoolfriend, Percival Harris, who is a Fleet...
Michael H. Kater, congratulations on After the Nazis. You’ve written about how important democracy was for culture to thrive in Germany. Were there any cultural achievements under the Nazis? In the Third Reich, cultural achievements in line with a democratic value...
