Nigel Jones

The link between mass-murdering dictators and the gentle occupation of reading and writing books is a curious one, but it definitely exists. Mao was a much- praised practitioner of traditional Chinese poetry; Hitler was widely if haphazardly read, dictated Mein Kampf and was a fan of Karl May’s Wild West stories; and Stalin, as Geoffrey

In the three centuries between 1450 and 1750 in Europe it is estimated that up to 100,000 women were burned, hanged, drowned or put to death in other ingenious ways on suspicion of being witches. John Callow’s thoroughly researched book tells the story of three such women, the last judicial victims in England of what

Of the two dictators who began the second world war as allied partners in crime but ended it in combat to the death, there is no doubt who has received more attention from historians and in the popular imagination. So much so, indeed, that the conflict is often labelled ‘Hitler’s War’. In this unashamedly revisionist

Tragically, the current pandemic lends this sparkling study of London in its most decisive century a grim topicality — for the city, during the most explosively expansive phase in its growth, also experienced the arrival of two of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse — war and pestilence — riding in to wreak havoc on

Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and the second world war? Since Ian Kershaw published his two-volume biography of the Führer 20 years ago, there have been at least a dozen similarly weighty tomes on the war by historians including Max Hastings, Andrew Roberts, Antony Beevor and Kershaw himself;

When lists are compiled of our best and worst prime ministers (before the present incumbent), the two main protagonists of this book usually feature, holding the top and bottom positions. Attempts are periodically made to revise these verdicts, most recently in John McDonnell’s description of Churchill as a villain; and by Robert Harris’s sympathetic portrayal

Who says that the ‘great man’ theory of history is dead? Following hard on the heels of Andrew Roberts’s magnificent biography of Churchill comes this equally well-written life of another superman who bestrode his era and all Europe like a colossus. Although Adam Zamoyski is at pains to insist that his subject was an ordinary

When I reviewed the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s wrist-breaking history of the last 100 years of Europe, To Hell and Back, in these pages exactly three years ago, I compared our continent in 1945 to a punch-drunk boxer rising from the canvas with both eyes blacked. How, I wondered, would Kershaw handle the

He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler. He had webbed toes, a grey face pitted by smallpox, a stunted arm, soft voice, yellowish eyes and an awkward rolling walk. He swore like a trooper, smoked a pipe, drank the sweet wines of

We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic turn, but the diary of Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, a former chief of British Naval Intelligence and fanatical admirer of Nazi Germany, proves otherwise. Domvile’s description of his visit to Himmler’s ‘hunting box’ high in

Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is a memorial raised by the Protestant Alliance in 1870 commemorating the men and women who died agonisingly nearby, roasted alive for refusing to abjure their new-found reformed religion. Nimble intellectual footwork was needed across the

It is easy to see why the bare century of the Tudor dynasty’s rule has drawn so much attention from contemporary women historians. Without breaking sweat, I can think of at least ten — four of whom garland this book with advance praise — who have written biographies or studies of the Welsh upstarts, leaving

Until it was overtaken by the still more disastrous debacle in Iraq, the Suez Crisis of 1956 was widely judged to be Britain’s worst postwar foreign blunder. Not only, to use Talleyrand’s phrase, a crime, but an error of monumental proportions. The deceitful plot by Britain and France, in secret collusion with Israel, to invade

In this centenary year of the Somme, it is refreshing to read a book about the Great War that is not yet another dreary recital of the tragic and over-familiar facts, but successfully gets to grips with the dilemmas facing the commanders and politicians mediating the gargantuan conflict. Historical debate about the war now boils

When archaeologists unearthed the battered mortal remains of King Richard III beneath a council car park in Leicester in 2012, they not only made the historical find of the century (so far) but unleashed a veritable frenzy of media attention on a ruler already the most notorious in English history. A stream of books, articles

Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and Nemesis. He is now attempting to repeat the feat with a two-volume history of modern Europe, of which this is the opening shot.Inevitably, the figure of the Führer once again marches across Kershaw’s pages as