The Manchurian Candidate tells a completely implausible story – or does it? Following his capture by Soviet troops during the Korean War, a U.S. soldier named Raymond Shaw is brainwashed and turned into the perfect…
In 2002, John Judis wrote a book predicting a new Democratic majority. It was his riposte to Kevin Phillips’ The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) which correctly predicted a quarter century of conservative Republican dominance of…
In 1939, British writer Geoffrey Household imagined how a lone sniper might attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler at his Bavarian vacation home near Berchtesgaden. Two years later, anti-Nazi German director Fritz Lang — now exiled…
First of all, this is a terrific book. It is, in one sense, a coming-of-age story, but it is so much more. At the heart of the story is the eponymous Daniel whose life changes…
The German army would have won the First World War, except that it was “stabbed in the back” by Socialists and Communists. Hitler was convinced by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he…
In August 1942, nearly two years before D-Day, Allied forces landed in France in large numbers. The Dieppe raid, which consisted mainly of Canadians, was considered a failure at the time. No permanent beachhead was…
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Myth. Calories accurately measure how fattening a food is. Myth. All processed food is bad for us. Myth. And so on. Tim Spector has identified more…
One thing I love about reading older books is that often they were intended to be read immediately, to change the way people thought, and were not aimed at posterity. This is that kind of…
The 1944 German offensive in the Ardennes forest “had brought the terrifying brutality of the eastern front to the west,” concludes Antony Beevor in this book. And “terrifying brutality” is an accurate description indeed of…
Henry Hemming is a great story-teller — and this is a great story. In June 1940, during the ‘darkest hour’ in modern British history, when a German invasion of England seemed only weeks away, William…