World War 2
Chaps v. Japs
Does anyone do derring-do anymore? Here’s the real thing. On Christmas Day 1941, despite Churchill’s call to fight to the last man, Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, the first… Read more
The Ritz in the Blitz
‘It was like a drug, a disease,’ said the legendary Ritz employee Victor Legg of the institution he served for half a century. There’s something magical about London’s grand hotels.… Read more
Strategies for survival
This is an account of the multiplicity of ways in which men ‘stole back time from their captors through creativity’ in the prisoner-of-war camps of Europe and the Far East.… Read more
Goodbye to Berlin
Peter Parker is beguiled by a novel approach to the lives of Europe’s intellectual elite in flight from Nazi Germany In his time, Heinrich Mann was considered one of Germany’s… Read more
A conflict of loyalty
What was life like in Hitler’s Germany? This question has long fascinated authors and readers alike, as books like Alone in Berlin, The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas and The… Read more
Pastures new
On 20 September 1949, five days after his election as Chancellor of the newly created German Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer addressed the Bundestag: ‘Much unhappiness and much damage’, he told… Read more
Can it be described?
Where was God in the Holocaust? This question confounds even learned rabbis, so let’s not linger there. Where was God in the Holocaust? This question confounds even learned rabbis, so… Read more
A war of nutrition
The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of the Nazi assault on Poland on 1 September and the… Read more
Memories of wartime
I was born in London in 1935. By the summer of 1939, it was considered wise to get children out of the city before the war started. I wasn’t separated… Read more
Something filthy by return
Gerard Woodward’s Nourishment opens in second world war London. Gerard Woodward’s Nourishment opens in second world war London. Tory Pace, a tired and drawn ‘mother-of-three and wife-to-one’, works alongside other… Read more
Days of wine and shrapnel
Virginia Cowles was a 27-year-old American journalist working for the Hearst newspapers when she went to Spain for the first time. It was March 1937; the battle of Guadalajara had… Read more
From void to void, with time to kill
Just as the slaughter in the trenches of Flanders and northern France gave birth to the tragic verses of Wilfred Owen, so the experience of bombing and being bombed between… Read more
A dream to fly
Undeniably the Hawker Hurricane has suffered the fate of the less pretty sister. It is the Spitfire, at once beautiful and deadly, that is forever the star of 1940, firmly… Read more
All eyes and ears
Both of these books aim, in their different ways, to cater for Britain’s long-standing obsession with espionage and other forms of political and military intelligence. Both of these books aim,… Read more
The French connection
If ever there was a novel to which that old adage about not judging a book by its cover could be applied, it’s this one. If ever there was a… Read more
L’homme qui dit non
The study of history is a subversive calling. All countries make up a story that suits their idea of themselves. Authoritarians stamp out independent historical scholarship; extreme nationalists simply vilify… Read more
Reverting to type
While I was living in Tokyo, a Japanese girl friend of mine fell in love with a British investment banker. After promising marriage, he abandoned her for an English wife… Read more
Might and wrong
‘Was all this the realisation of our war aims?’, Malcolm Muggeridge asked as he surveyed the desolation of Berlin in May 1945. ‘Was all this the realisation of our war… Read more
Paranoia and empty promises
It has taken more than half a century, but at last the Anglophone world has woken up to the fact that 20th-century communist history makes a superb backdrop for fiction.… Read more
Latest blogs
- ‘Soldier beheaded’ in south London: the Islamists repeatedly said they would do such things Douglas Murray
- The Sweet Sorrow of following Somerset Cricket Alex Massie
- Breaking: soldier ‘beheaded’ in Woolwich, south London The Spectator
- Exclusive: Clement Attlee backs Michael Gove’s free schools Fraser Nelson
- The chancellor survived the IMF report, but there’s another challenge ahead James Forsyth
- Summer party season begins Steerpike
- Cameron leaves the goal open for Clegg and Miliband on tax avoidance Isabel Hardman
