normandy

What did Britain really gain from the daring 1942 Bruneval raid?

10 August 2024 9:00 am

The night-time dismantling of a German radar site in Normandy was a feat of skill, courage and imagination. But there was little improvement to Bomber Command casualties as a result

The Hundred Years War ends in England’s agonising defeat – but triumph for Jonathan Sumption

26 August 2023 9:00 am

England’s final, agonising defeat in the Hundred Years War brings Jonathan Sumption’s monumental history to a close. David Crane salutes 43 years of research and writing

All about my mother: Édouard Louis’s latest family saga

9 July 2022 9:00 am

Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village…

‘I think I’ve found a real paradise’: David Hockney interviewed

24 April 2020 11:00 pm

Martin Gayford talks to David Hockney about life in the Norman countryside under quarantine, how the iPad is better than paint and brush, and why he is not a communist

A soldier’s legacy: how a baby’s cry saved a family

21 December 2019 9:00 am

It was early evening on Sunday 6 August 1944. The Allies’ bloody struggle to liberate Normandy from the Nazis had…

Were all those young lives lost at Normandy in vain?

2 June 2018 9:00 am

I’m back in New York and digesting the five glorious days spent in Normandy. What was the fighting all about,…

Dispatch from Pegasus Bridge, Normandy

26 May 2018 9:00 am

Pegasus Bridge, Normandy   We’re taking morning coffee at the Café Gondrée, which skirts the bridge. It still belongs to…

Le Perche: every farmyard looks like a painting

Beauty, tragedy and black pudding: the delights of Normandy

16 May 2015 9:00 am

I am compiling a list of the best black puddings. It began in Spain when I encountered my first morcilla…

King John at Runnymede: at odds with his barons, he came to rely on mercenaries whom he couldn’t afford

King John was not a good man: two distinguished historians echo A.A. Milne

11 April 2015 9:00 am

This being the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, it is not surprising that there should be two…

A Russian occupation and a veterans' revolt – it's D-Day all over again

7 June 2014 9:00 am

The phrase ‘ring of steel’ hardly begins to describe the operation here in Calvados country as we await the 70th…

This year, discover Michel Déon

11 January 2014 9:00 am

In Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, the efforts of an academic claque propel the mysterious German author Benno von Archimboldi onto…

Letters: The EU diplomats hit back at Norman Lamont

27 July 2013 9:00 am

EU diplomacy Sir: Lord Lamont’s article ‘The EU’s scandalous new army of overpaid diplomats’ (Politics, 20 July) revisits his oft-repeated…

Unassuming: Port-en-Bessin today

Notes on…Normandy

20 July 2013 9:00 am

There are some, I know, who for whom Normandy means the three Cs — cider, cream and calvados. But if,…