What a great idea for a book: a review of the all the German plans, some completely bonkers, some plausible, to strike back at the United States during the Second World War. One of the…
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This is how history should be written. Roger Moorhouse has taken a subject rarely covered in detail despite its obvious importance and done a very thorough job of it. He begins the book by pointing…
The Kurds currently under attack by Turkish forces “didn’t help us in the second world war, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example,” said US president Donald Trump this week. “They mention the…
Five years ago, the Kurdish enclave of Kobane in Northern Syria was besieged by Islamic State fighters, who then seemed to be on an unstoppable march through Iraq and Syria, with cities and towns falling…
Robert Harris often has the very best ideas for his books, but sometimes the book itself is a real let-down. The Second Sleep is an example of this. First of all, his good idea —…
In the 1960’s there was a thriller called The President’s Plane is Missing by Robert J. Serling, the older brother of Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame. As I remember it, the book wasn’t bad….
My article about the rebellion of Georgian soldiers on the Dutch island of Texel in April-May 1945 — often described as the final battle of the second world war in Europe — has appeared in…
A German couple recently went on holiday in the Austrian Alps, and found a four-star hotel in the village of Gerlos. To their shock, in the lobby were two framed photographs of men in World…
This was a surprising book. I expected an account of the numerous small-scale attempts by individuals and tiny groups of decent Germans to oppose the Nazi regime, such as the famous White Rose group. Instead,…
‘Joe’ in this case is slang for a secret agent. This book, the sixth and latest (but not last) of the series is set in Slough House, the place where the British secret service discards…