Ww2

My wife and I spent the winter in Worcestershire. This allowed me to tell everyone back home in the States: ‘We are wintering in Worcestershire.’ This may be a sentence that has never actually been uttered in human history, even by people who spend all their winters in Worcestershire. It turned out to be a wonderful time, despite us arriving in, according to the papers, ‘the wettest winter since 1755’. For what seemed like weeks, every time I turned on the television while cooking, there was Mr Cameron beneath a brolly (as I think you call them) shouting into a microphone, ‘Money is no object!’ There was a lot to

I feel an intense antipathy for Vladimir Putin. No one on the international scene has aroused in me such dislike since Stalin died. Though not a mass killer on the Stalin scale, he has the same indifference to human life. There is a Stalinist streak of gangsterism too: his ‘loyalists’ wear masks as well as carry guns. Putin also resembles Hitler in his use of belligerent minorities to spread his power. Am I becoming paranoid about Putin? I hope not. But I am painfully aware that he would not matter if there was a strong man in Washington. As it is, President Obama is a feeble and cowardly man who

‘He was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.’ Those words are taken from Officers and Gentlemen, the second volume in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour, his trilogy about the second world war. The words describe the disillusion of the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, as Britain sides with Soviet Russia to defeat Hitler: an alliance with an atheist tyranny to defeat an atheist tyranny, an alliance that led to the betrayal – perhaps necessary – of Eastern Europe at Yalta. The words resonate

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

Among the millions of words which will be expended over the next four years on the first world war, very few will be devoted to explaining one of its greatest legacies of all, the effects of which continue to dominate our politics to this day. One of the best-kept secrets of the European Union is that the core idea which gave rise to it owed its genesis not to the second world war, as is generally supposed, but to the Great War a quarter of a century earlier. It was around that time that the man who can be described as ‘the Father of Europe’ was first inspired to the

I’ve worked for the BBC for years and have been listening to the Today programme all my adult life, but joining it as a presenter feels like exploring a new frontier. Being on top of your brief is one thing; the mechanics of a three-hour live radio programme quite another. Take the junctions leading up to the ‘pips’ at the start of each hour. From television, I’ve been accustomed to directors counting presenters down to these junctions while they ad-lib on air — the idea being to stop talking as the voice in your ear says ‘zero’. But radio presenters are pretty much on their own, watching the clock and

As I write, the World Islamic Economic Forum is opening in London, the first time it has been held in a non-Muslim country. David Cameron boasts that investors will now be able to buy sharia-compliant British gilts. If the forum helps Muslim countries share their commercial expertise with one another and the rest of us, well and good. But should modes of global commerce be defined by religious allegiance? What would the conspiracy theorists say about a World Jewish Economic Forum? How would Saudi Arabia — or even Dubai — react to the suggestion of a World Christian Economic Forum taking place within its borders?  And once it is officially proclaimed a

Given that more than 9,000 innocent Italian civilians, many of them women and children, died in Nazi massacres during the dreadful last 18 months of the second world war, it is amazing how few of the perpetrators have been brought to justice. Only five members of the German occupying forces were ever imprisoned in Italy for war crimes; and with the death last week, aged 100, of Erich Priebke, the former SS captain who in 1944 helped organise the execution of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves south of Rome, none of them is now still alive. Hundreds of others were, of course, involved in these crimes, but

My village, Stoke Bruerne in south Northamptonshire, is just getting back to normal after a great influx of visitors for its annual weekend festival called ‘Village at War’. Stoke Bruerne is a small place that sits astride the Grand Union Canal about halfway along its route from London to Birmingham. Its fame, such as it is, rests on its seven locks and the fact that it houses a Canal Museum; and the ‘Village at War’ event was started six years ago by the Friends of the Canal Museum to raise money for that excellent institution. I don’t yet know how well it has done this year, but last year it