Few women have had more written about them, mostly of a critical, salacious nature, than Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee for whom Edward VIII gave up his crown. Much of the gossip has fed on what became known as the ‘China Dossier’, a supposed compendium of the year Simpson (or Spencer, as she then was)
As Hilary Mantel memorably noted, history represents what people try to hide, and researching it is a question of ferreting out what they want you not to discover. Claire Hubbard-Hall’s plan to unearth the identities and lives of the legions of women who have worked unheralded in the British secret services was bold: looking for
In recent years, far from diminishing, the number of books on the Nazis, Occupied Europe and the Holocaust – events that now lie three quarters of a century in the past – seem only to grow. New archives are opened and attics are raided for forgotten diaries and letters. One historian who has mined them
One evening, a man and a woman who haven’t met for decades bump into each other at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. It’s a familiar tale, but one to which Roxana Robinson brings many twists in her highly enjoyable latest novel, Leaving. Sarah and Warren were childhood sweethearts in a suburb outside Philadelphia. Sarah
On the night of 9 November 1938, across Germany and Austria, Jews were attacked and their synagogues and businesses set on fire. In the days that followed Kristallnacht, a scheme was put in place to save children from Nazi persecution. Known as the Kindertransport, it would, over the following ten months, bring 10,000 children to
When the Germans occupied northern Italy in the autumn of 1943, they were pleased with the way that young Italian women, pedalling on bicycles around the country lanes in white socks and pigtails, smiled at them. The soldiers offered to help with their loaded baskets and gave them lifts in lorries. It took some months
No one had prepared the Allied soldiers, as they began their invasion of the Reich early in 1945, for what they would find. The discovery by the Soviets of the extermination camp of Majdanek in July 1944, and Auschwitz in January 1945, had not really registered, not least because they had been partly emptied and
When in 1941 Winston Churchill famously declared that the newly formed Special Operations Executive, set up to encourage resistance movements, would ‘set Europe ablaze’, neither he nor anyone else could have known the extent of the help the partisans would provide to the liberation of the continent. Nor, indeed, did anyone envisage the fact that
Fedor Zan was 18, working on the river closing sluices, when, on a winter afternoon in 1942, he saw his childhood friend Andrei Sawoniuk standing in a clearing outside Domachevo, their town in Belarus. Sawoniuk had lined up 15 terrified women, all wearing the yellow Jewish star. As Zan watched, hidden behind the pine trees,
In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new chief of police. Arturo Bocchini was 36, a lawyer and former prefect of Brescia, a cynical, vengeful, witty and corpulent Neapolitan. Under his 17-year tenure, fascist Italy became one of the most sinister and efficient
On 14 October 1942, the 23 Swiss members of the International Committee of the Red Cross met in Geneva to decide whether or not to go public with what they then knew about Auschwitz and the Nazis’ extermination plans. When they emerged two hours later they had voted, almost unanimously, to remain silent. As did
When Rome fell to the Allies on 5 June 1944 General Harold Alexander, commander of the 15th Army, calculated that he would need just 12 weeks to reach the river Po and liberate Italy from the Germans. It took him nearly a year. Christian Jennings’s new book chronicles the months of heavy fighting, the advances
The Yacoubian Building, the first novel of the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, sold well over a million copies in 35 languages, was made into a film, and turned him overnight into one of the most listened to voices in the Arab world. What followed — Chicago, set in the city in which Al Aswany
When she was four, Anne Sinclair had her portrait painted by Marie Laurencin. It is a charming picture, a little dark-brown-haired girl with a white bow, very blue eyes and a white and pink striped blouse, and it was commissioned by Sinclair’s grandfather, Paul Rosenberg, one of the handful of most influential Parisian art dealers
In February 1924 the Hotel Florida, a ten- storey marble-clad building with 200 rooms, a glass-roofed atrium and red plush furnishings, went up on Madrid’s Gran Via. Along with the Ritz in Paris, certainly the most celebrated hotel in the literary world, the Florida became, during the two-year battle for the capital waged between Franco’s
There can be few characters in modern fiction more unpleasant than Paul-Jean Husson, the narrator in Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le Commandant. Indeed, he is at times too nasty. If this otherwise compulsively readable novel about betrayal in Nazi-occupied France has a flaw, it lies in Husson’s irredeemable villainy, as if to make such a man
When Bernini designed his fountain of the four rivers for the Piazza Navona in Rome in 1651 he draped the head of the god of the Nile with a loose piece of cloth, to denote the fact that its source remained unknown. Tracing the sources of both the Blue and the White Nile would become
No one could ever accuse Shereen El Feki of lacking in courage. To spend five years travelling around the Arab world in search of dildos, questioning women about foreplay and anal sex, is not a task many writers would relish. Sex and the Citadel is a bold, meticulously researched mini Kinsey Report, rich in anecdote
In his introduction, James Fergusson apologises for the title of his book. Somalia, he writes, may no longer be the most dangerous place on earth. Since the summer of 2012, a newly elected government under a former university professor who once worked for the UN is bringing stability to the country, exiled Somalis are going
A group of friends, Palestinian and foreign, go to picnic at a wadi between Jerusalem and Jericho. They are wearing bright, casual summer clothes. On a nearby rock sits another party of picnickers, only they are dressed in veils, long skirts and black coats. For a while no one says anything. Then, suddenly, over a
