The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Churchill’s Citadel, by Katherine Carter You may have read all 911 pages, excluding notes or index, of Roy Jenkin’s magisterial biography of Winston Churchill, which after 20 years remains incredibly sound. There is also a good chance that you’ve read Andrew Robert’s...
Churchill’s Citadel When Winston Churchill saw a house on a hill called Chartwell, it was love at first sight, but not with the house itself. It was the landscape, first seen by him on a beautiful summer’s day in 1921, that captivated him. Its situation on a hillside,...
Mark, many congratulations on the new book. There is a lot of myth surrounding Russia’s history, not least from Vladimir Putin. How much of its military past is in the average Russian’s consciousness? More, honestly, than we might anticipate from a Western standpoint....
One could be excused for thinking that a travel guide on the Holocaust would be in bad taste. Having read Rosie Whitehouse’s excellent, The Holocaust: A Guide to Europe’s Sites, Memorial & Museums I can assure you that nothing is further from the truth. One of the...
January 2025 will be the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, a single event which has come to symbolise the Holocaust. No-one could claim that in the eighty years since there’s been a shortage of literature on the Holocaust: a search on...
England’s Alexander, Dan Jones on Henry V I’m sure many of us remember studying Henry V at school. For those of us at the age of thirteen not wholly thrilled to be forced to read Shakespeare, this play was undeniably entertaining. We even enjoyed mimicking the accents...
In many respects, it seemed as if the year of 1943 commenced with the war in Eastern Europe finely poised. The German Sixth Army was surrounded in Stalingrad and much of the southern sector of the long front line was highly fluid, with Soviet units attempting to push...
Hero City: Leningrad 1943–44 St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, St Petersburg. Peter the Great’s window on the world, the birthplace of the Bolshevik Revolution and of Vladimir Putin. It has always been seen as occupying a strategic position, although its geographic...
