Vichy
France’s second world war shame
The monument to this French village’s war dead is a plain white stone block with the head of a grizzled…
Racism is a grey area
This book is an exercise in crying wolf that utterly fails to prove its main thesis: that Europe is abandoning…
Allan Massie’s Bordeaux Quartet: truer to Occupied France than any history
In a recent book review, the historian Norman Stone wrote: ‘Maybe the second world war can now be left to…
The facts behind France’s most potent modern myth
Patrick Marnham unravels some of the powerful, often conflicting myths surrounding the French Resistance
Pick of the crime novels
Stuart MacBride’s new novel, A Song for the Dying (HarperCollins, £16.99, Spectator Bookshop, £14.99), is markedly darker in tone than…
What took Francis Mitterrand to the top?
Of a dashing political rival, François Mitterrand once remarked: He was more intelligent than I was, he thought faster than…
