Hitler

I felt so awful I almost prayed that we would crash

This is about life up high. Two weeks ago The Spectator had that rapscallion and mischief-maker Peter McKay writing about how great it is to pilot a plane. (He’s taking lessons and has flown solo.) I’ve always been told that riding a motorcycle and piloting a plane are about the same, and McKay is a motorcyclist. His build, looks and accent are far more suited to riding on two wheels than to piloting a plane (that role is more one for a Cary Grant type). But I am being snobby and writing like McKay — cattily. Reading about flying brought back pleasant memories, but also a tragic one. When my

A great historian with fascist tendencies has died

A great historian has died. He joined the Nazi party in the 1930s, spurred by a fear of the communism which was then spreading through Europe. Although he survived for many decades to see the consequences of the ideology, he nevertheless remained nostalgic for, and loyal to, fascism. He also retained an active interest in the Conservative party and acted as a guru for a time to John Major, though he subsequently expressed disappointment at the direction of his leadership. In a statement the current leader of the Conservative party, David Cameron described the historian as: ‘An extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of

Deborah Devonshire: JFK’s friend, Hitler’s antagonist, The Spectator’s columnist

The lives of the Mitford Sisters have riveted, and repelled, anglophiles since the thirties. Diana Mitford once wrote, ‘I must admit “the Mitfords” would madden ME if I didn’t chance to be one’. Their hold on the public imagination can be attributed to a mixture of aristocratic eccentricity, romance, rebellion, devotion, betrayal, estrangement, tragedy, and loss; and through it all, a uniquely irrepressible wit. And although much of it will survive in the memoirs, biographies, novels, and collected letters they and others have written, the last living link has been lost with the death of Deborah, the youngest of that astonishing sextet. Between 1904 and 1920, Lord and Lady Redesdale

Hugh Trevor-Roper: the spy as historian, the historian as spy

Shortly after the war began in September 1939, the branch of the intelligence services called MI8, or the Radio Security Service, recruited H.R. Trevor-Roper (as his name would appear the following year on the title page of his first book, his acerbic and somewhat anti-clerical life of Archbishop Laud). He was a young Oxford don, or would-be don, a research fellow of Merton. His academic career was now interrupted for six years: nominally commissioned in the Life Guards, he plunged deep into the murky world of secret intelligence. Before that, and before he turned to Modern History, Trevor-Roper had been a brilliant classicist, winning a string of university prizes. He

The real Dad’s Army was no joke

Dad’s Army, the sitcom to end all sitcoms, portrayed the Home Guard as often doddery veterans. In one episode, Private Godfrey’s genteel sisters are seen to prepare their Regency cottage for the feared Hitler invasion. ‘The Germans are coming, Miss Godfrey,’ Lance Corporal Jones warns. ‘Yes I know, so many people to tea,’ she chirrups, adding: ‘I think I’d better make some more.’ In contrast to Godfrey, the sitcom’s street-smart spiv Joe Walker could be relied on to come up with the goods. In his rakish trilby indeed he supplies the platoon with contraband cigarettes and is familiar with the legendary backs of lorries what things fall off of. Leo

Hitler’s Valkyrie: Unity Mitford at 100

On 8 August 1914, four days after the declaration of war, Unity Valkyrie Mitford was born, the fifth child and fourth daughter of David and Sydney Freeman-Mitford, who admired the actress Unity Moore. Grandfather Redesdale suggested Valkyrie, after his friend Wagner’s Norse war-maidens. The fact that Unity Valkyrie had been conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, where her father was prospecting for gold, made it all the more portentous. A few weeks after her birth, Unity and her mother (‘Muv’) joined ‘Farve’, who was with his regiment in Newcastle. His quarters were so cramped that Unity was laid to sleep in a drawer. But this was nothing to the

From Göring to Hemingway, via Coco Chanel – the dark glamour of the Paris Ritz at war

In Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen did a good job of showing how foolish it is to be obsessed by previous generations who’ve passed through Paris. Going back through the years, each group of geniuses turns out to be just as drunk and silly as the next, albeit with longer cigarette holders. Tilar Mazzeo, who has written biographies of Coco Chanel and the woman behind Veuve Clicquot, has done a similar service with this history of the Ritz. Focusing on the hotel is partly a device to write about the German occupation, but it’s mainly a way of gathering all the old Paris icons under one roof. Marcel Proust, Ernest

Sam Leith

Churchill was as mad as a badger. We should all be thankful

Land sakes! Another book about Winston Churchill? Really? Give us a break, the average reader may think. Actually though, as title and subtitle suggest, this isn’t just another biographical study. It’s at once odder and more conventional than that. More conventional because, in some ways, it is just another biographical study. Odder because — instead of being a straightforward discussion of Churchill’s literary work — it sees literature as the key to his biography. More than that, its author seems to think he has hit on a ‘new methodology’ in which ‘we can write political history as literary history’. Well, perhaps. At one end of that notion is the banality

Charlie Chaplin, monster

No actual birth certificate for Charles Spencer Chaplin has ever been found. The actor himself drew a blank when he went on a rummage in Somerset House. The latest research suggests that he was born ‘in a gypsy caravan in Smethwick, near Birmingham’. But surely the truth has been staring people in the face ever since the Little Tramp first popped on the screen: Chaplin is the lost twin of Adolf Hitler. Peter Ackroyd almost suggests as much. Both men first drew breath in April 1889. They had drunken fathers and nervous mothers. There were patterns of madness and illegitimacy in the family tree. They were short and sported an

How Denmark’s Jews escaped the Nazis

Of all the statistics generated by the Holocaust, perhaps some of the most disturbing in the questions they give rise to are the following. Of the Jews in Hungary, the Netherlands, Greece, Latvia and Poland, between 70 and 90 per cent died, while the corresponding figures for Estonia, Belgium Norway and Romania were between 40 and 50. In France and Italy somewhere around 20 per cent perished. In both Bulgaria and Denmark, however, just one. Bo Lidegaard’s Countrymen is the story of how Denmark to a great extent saved its  Jewish population from the labour and extermination camps, but it inevitably raises issues of equal relevance to the rest of

The joy of online hatred

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Julie Burchill debates Paris Lees on intersectionality”] Listen [/audioplayer]On Saturday morning, when the body of the beautiful Antipodean model and television personality Charlotte Dawson was being taken from her home in Sydney, I was back in Blighty rolling up my sleeves and getting stuck in for yet another happy hour in the gladiatorial arena that is the Spectator online comments section. Wherein, amongst other things, an angry trans-person had threatened me with the Police, for committing Hate Crimes (note the use of Krazy Kapitals) and a Beating from her Hells Angel Husband. These two things might seem completely random were it not for the fact that in 2012

Did Hollywood moguls really make a pact with Hitler?

At the recent Austin Film Festival, at every ruminative panel or round-table discussion I attended, I slapped my copy of this book down in front of me. The cover, I felt, was bound to catch the eye of the screen legends and louche suits from the big production companies. Above the uncompromising title, it shows a photograph of Adolf Hitler watching a movie with his entourage, his stern, blunt features palely lit by the glowing screen, his mouth small, his nostrils flared in concentration. What, one wonders, was he watching? Laurel and Hardy? Mickey Mouse? It’s not impossible, actually. We know for a fact that the psychotic cinephile adored cartoons

Hitler didn’t start indiscriminate bombings — Churchill did 

‘I cannot describe to you what a curious note of brutality a bomb has,’ said one woman who lived through the initial German raids on London during the second world war. This woman’s ambivalent reaction to having a bomb rip through her bedroom typified the shocking reality of a different type of war to any that had ever been fought before. For as Richard Overy makes eminently clear in his extraordinary and far-reaching history of Europe’s bombing war, this was the first time civilians actually became a part of the front line. The cause of this was the advent of aerial bombardment, which, Overy says, exposed ‘the democratic nature of

Noble Endeavours, by Miranda Seymour – review

Like Miranda Seymour, the author of this considerable work on Anglo-German relations, I was raised in a Germanophile home. I spent summer holidays on the Bodensee and, after graduating from university, lived for a year in Munich and then another in Berlin. It seems to me a pity that my children and most of my friends, familiar with the Dordogne, Tuscany, California, New York and Rajasthan, have never been to the Black Forest or the Bavarian Alps; have never visited Potsdam, Dresden, Würzburg, Freiberg, Heidelberg, Regensburg or Passau; in fact know next to nothing of either the culture or civilisation of the largest nation in western Europe. Yet there have

Henry Goodman interview: How to make Brecht fun

The face is unlined. The tan is as deep as Brazilian hardwood. The thatch of grey hair looks like a gift from God rather than the achievement of surgical intervention. At 63, the actor Henry Goodman keeps himself in excellent trim. He exudes energy and concentration, and in the hour we spend together, he relates every aspect of our talk straight back to the show he’s promoting, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Brecht’s political allegory uses imaginary figures from Chicago’s underworld to satirise Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany during the 1930s. The script was written in just three weeks, in 1941, while Brecht was in exile in Helsinki

Diary – 11 April 2013

Whenever feminists have complained in my presence about neglect of female high-achievers, other than rock singers and courtesans, I always like to mention brilliant Margaret Thatcher. It always makes them furious. They can’t bear to think of her as one of the most successful women of the 20th century. I had afternoon tea with her and Denis once in their chintzy flat at No. 10, where she expressed a great interest in Rupert Murdoch, whom she rather admired. My father-in-law, Stephen Spender, was also a Maggie fan and once, after he had delivered a speech about Henry Moore at Westminster Abbey, she repeated the whole speech back to him at

National Socialism: the clue’s in the name

How can conservatives ensure they always lose? A good place to start is to concede every lie of the left. The Conservative Party appears to be doing what it can in this regard. Take their decision to strike Rachel Frosh from their candidates list for the great crime of… linking Nazism to socialism. Frosh committed her thought crime on Twitter. Thanks to a left-wing stink being kicked up on the same medium, her career – including twenty years in the NHS – is now apparently nullified overnight. She has had to step down from her role as a Police and Crime Commissioner and now she cannot stand for the Conservatives

The Fuhrer was not amused

‘The German sense of humour,’ Mark Twain famously observed, ‘Is no laughing matter.’ Although many Greeks, stretched on the Euro’s rack at Berlin’s behest, may be inclined to agree, Rudolph Herzog’s intriguing study of humour in and against Hitler’s Germany, Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler’s Germany, proves conclusively that the Teutonic funny bone, while it may be difficult to locate, definitely exists. Herzog, the son of the great German film director Werner Herzog, has written a book that is at once an anthology of German jokes current under the Third Reich, an analysis of their evolution as a weapon of resistance against Nazi rule, an insight into how Europe’s

Eric Hobsbawm: A man of Extremes

A few years ago, I wrote a review of Eric Hobsbawm’s last collection of essays and noted  ‘Hobsbawm is now 94, and although I have no wish to usher the old boy from the room, I can see his obituaries now. Conservative and liberal writers will say that his loyalty to totalitarianism disfigured his writing, most notably, in his whitewashing of Soviet atrocities in The Age of Extremes, his history of the 20th century. Leftists will say he was the greatest Marxist historian of our times, whose sweeping accounts of the world from the Enlightenment to the present have shaped the way we think. Neither will acknowledge that both have

Blast from the past: The Teleportation Accident reviewed

He’d probably agree with Edward Gibbon’s assessment of history as ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’ but Ned Beauman’s instinct as to why we do what we do is a lot more basic. We’re motivated by sex: whether we’re having it or – as is more often the case in Beauman’s world – not having it. And he might have a point. Take for example Ernst Hanfstaengl who described his former buddy, a certain Adolf Hitler, as “a man who was neither fish, flesh nor fowl, neither fully homosexual nor fully heterosexual… I had formed the firm conviction that he was impotent, the