Hitler
The secret life of Thomas Mann: The Magician, by Colm Tóibín, reviewed
In a letter to Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika sight unseen in order to…
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was lucky to escape retribution in 1945
They rather like bad boys, the French. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is one, in a tradition that stretches from François Villon…
Chips Channon’s judgment was abysmal, but the diaries are a great work of literature
It is often said that the best political diaries are written by those who dwell in the foothills of power.…
Nazis and Nordics: the latest crime fiction reviewed
Social historians of the future may look back at the reading habits of this era and conclude that we were…
The uncomfortable truth about the Nazis and the Olympics
The uncomfortable truth about the Nazis and the Olympics
Tala Halawa and the progressive media’s anti-Semitism blindspot
The tale of Tala Halawa has an ever-mounting horror to it: each sentence is more disturbing than the last. First…
Arthur Bryant: monstrous chronicler of Merrie England
If you want to judge how much society has changed, you might do worse than visit a few secondhand bookshops.…
Stalin as puppet master: how Uncle Joe manipulated the West
Of the two dictators who began the second world war as allied partners in crime but ended it in combat…
Chips Channon’s diaries can read like a drunken round of Consequences
Chips Channon was conceited, snobbish, disloyal, voyeuristic and wrongheaded – all qualities most helpful to a great diarist, says Craig Brown
No, Spike Lee: Donald Trump is not like Hitler
I wish people would stop comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. Not because I’m worried about Trump’s feelings — he’s…
Why a row about the rise of Hitler has erupted in the German press
A debate is playing out in the German-speaking media about whether inflation or deflation was behind the rise of Adolf…
Hitler’s devastating secret weapon: V2, by Robert Harris, reviewed
After Stalingrad, Hitler desperately needed an encouraging novelty. Wernher von Braun, Germany’s leading rocketeer in the second world war, expertly…
Hitler’s admiration has severely damaged Wagner’s reputation
Wagner gripped the communal mind for decades after his death. Philip Hensher examines his enduring influence
Bombs over London: V for Victory, by Lissa Evans, reviewed
Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality.…
Why do monsters make such good writers?
Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters — Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the…
With these documentaries, the BBC has lost any claim to impartiality
Because the rise of the Nazis is a topic so rarely mentioned these days, least of all in schools, the…
What would Jane Austen say about Debrett’s going digital?
Seventy-five years ago on Saturday, the July plot failed. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg placed a bomb in a briefcase…
Where is the rise of neo-Nazism around Europe leading?
‘Why would anyone write a historical study of it?’ asks Gavriel Rosenfeld about the Fourth Reich at the start of…
Hitler’s would-be assassins were, themselves, Nazi war criminals. Why celebrate them?
On 20 July, Germany’s political elite recalls the day in 1944 when Colonel Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg exploded a…
Swept away by Hitler’s charisma: German women gush over the Führer
The distinguished historian Konrad Jarausch’s new book is a German narrative, told through the stories of ordinary people who lived…
From Stalin’s poetry to Saddam’s romances: the terrible prose of tyrants
‘Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect… Reading is love in action.’ Those are…
A chance to see the Moomins’ creator for the genius she really was: Tove Janssons reviewed
Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring…
Lend me your ears
Complaints about the decline and fall of political oratory are nothing new. Back in 1865 a British reporter branded the…
A grand inquisitor
Hidden behind Kensington Palace, in one of London’s smartest streets, there is a grand old house which played a leading…
The German Lion of Africa
What’s going on with book reviews? Here is the Pulitizer prizewinning (for ‘criticism’) Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, on…
