Society

Eighty years ago, as Red Army shells rained down over Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery garden, a group of his remaining friends and colleagues huddled under the block-shaped exit of his last grim command centre, the Führerbunker. Flames engulfed the bodies of the newlywed Mr and Mrs Hitler, casting a flickering light over the onlookers, who raised their arms in a final straight-armed salute. The enduring cultural and political relevance of Hitler’s death hardly needs restating. It gave us online parodies of the rant scene in the film Downfall and, of course, a wild range of conspiracy theories. I once hoped that my book Hitler’s Death: the Case Against Conspiracy might

Last week, a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge professor Nikku Madhusudhan announced that they had found tentative evidence for a ‘biosignature’ embedded in the light from a distant planet. Scientists and non-scientists around the world tried to interpret the results. Was this it? Was this the moment when humanity could finally claim it had answered that ancient question: are we alone? As an astrophysicist involved in the search for life beyond Earth, I can tell you that the results were not that moment. But that doesn’t make them any less exciting. The simplest cell on Earth puts every other physical system in the universe – including

Man out of time Sir: That Mary Wakefield left Rowan Williams ‘with my questions for the most part unresolved’ will come as no surprise to his former students, myself included (‘The ABC of faith’, 19 April). As a ‘mature’ student at Cambridge, there was something very inspiring about Williams the academic, but also comfortingly peaceful about the man; someone always on the journey of discovery and therefore reluctant on many issues to be dogmatic or final about them. His genuine surprise at how the real world operated one easily forgave; his naive approach to other issues, such as Islam, was dangerous but never disingenuous. As an Arabist I did find