The first of the Penguin Little Black Classics series that I’ve read — having bought a whole shelf of them a few years back — and it’s a good one. Chekhov is described as having…

Matt Ruff has taken a long, hard look at what life was like for African Americans in the early 1950s and reimagined it as horror fiction written by the master, H.P. Lovecraft. All the main…

Stephen King is a master story teller and his latest book is further proof of his skills. It tells the story of a young boy, Luke Ellis, who is kidnapped from his home as his…

We have been here before, and last time it was far worse. Somewhere between 50 and 100 million people died during the so-called “Spanish Flu”, for which there was no cure and no vaccine, in…

Journalist Kati Marton’s 1994 book opens with a description of the massacre of Arab worshippers in Hebron early that year by a far-right Jewish terrorist named Baruch Goldstein. Had her book appeared a year later,…

“I myself have been criticized because, during the last war, as one of the leaders of the Swedish Red Cross, I did not publicly denounce Nazism and its methods.” So wrote Count Folke Bernadotte at…

This is the diary of Counte Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Mediator sent to manage the truce between Israeli and Arab forces during the War of Independence and also to make progress toward a peace…

Adolf Hitler killed himself on 30 April 1945 in his bunker in Berlin. He did not escape to Argentina in a U-boat. He did not go into hiding in a monastery in Tibet. He was…

Before he was the United Nations peace envoy to the Middle East during the first Israeli-Arab war, Count Folke Bernadotte played a central role in a bizarre series of meetings with Heinrich Himmler and other…

I asked a friend recently what he knew about the Stern Gang, and he replied that they were “very small … and vicious”. That pretty much sums up the group known as the “Fighters for…