World War Two
Lambs to the slaughter: the fiasco of the Dieppe Raid, August 1942
One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe by David O’Keefe reviewed
Behind the veil of secrecy: GCHQ emerges from the shadows
Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency by John Ferris reviewed
Diplomatic daughters go behind the scenes at Yalta
The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War by Catherine Grace Katz reviewed
Break-out and betrayal in Occupied Europe
MI9 by Helen Fry and War in the Shadows by Patrick Marnham reviewed
My debt to Royaumont
A Spanish flag flew on the palace to protect it from the occupying Germans
A Soviet housewife spies on Little England
Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy by Ben Macintyre reviewed
The magic of JFK remains undimmed
JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 by Fredrik Logevall reviewed
Putin’s culture war
Putin is trying to mobilize the so-called Great Patriotic War in his drive to assert his country’s greatness
The doctor’s dilemma
Talking Until Nightfall: Remembering Jewish Salonica, 1941-44 by Isaac Matarasso reviewed
Hirohito, the war criminal who got away
Seventy-five years on, Japan still can’t come to terms with its past
An Anglo-American hero
Billy Fiske, the volunteer pilot who died to save Britain
The heroic couple who defied Hitler
The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis by Norman Ohler reviewed
The ghost of Clement Attlee
It is culture more than actual achievement that accounts for Attlee’s popular obscurity
The Battle of Britain was closer than it should have been
The Germans’ numerical ascendancy began to make itself felt by the end of the summer of 1940
Pigeons are the solution to the statue controversy
Let’s kill two birds with one stone
Cancel Clement Attlee, too
Unlike Churchill, he had not been a consistent opponent of Nazism or appeasement before the war
Macron is trying to bathe in de Gaulle’s glory. It won’t work
Politicians should be wary about instrumentalizing history for their own ends
Trump’s German troop withdrawal will hurt America
Many in Berlin feel that working with Trump has become an impossible task
Articles of War
In this excerpt from his autobiography Signatures: Literary Encounters of a Lifetime, David Pryce-Jones meets the survivors of the 20th century
Did George Formby and Gracie Fields really help Britain out of the Depression?
Cheer Up! British Musical Films, 1929-1945 by Adrian Wright reviewed
A passionate wartime love story is rescued from oblivion
Love in the Blitz: The Long-Lost Letters of a Brilliant Young Woman to Her Beloved on the Front by Eileen Alexander reviewed
A generation unmasked
The furor over the maskless VE celebration highlights the forces driving this moment of national fear and submission
Iceland and the story of a very British invasion
The British diplomats explained that they were terribly sorry about the inconvenience
Is baking and watching Netflix really comparable to being bombed?
It doesn’t take ‘Blitz spirit’ to hunker down at home
Ghost riders in the sky
In Lavenham, American history is unlocked by a pint of fine English ale
