Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin: review
09 Nov 2010
This is the first book in English to explore both German and Soviet mass killings together. As a history of political mass murder, Bloodlands serves to illuminate the political sickness that reduced 14 million people to the status of non-persons …
Encounter: Essays by Milan Kundera: review
05 Sept 2010
To judge by the essays collected in Encounter, Milan Kundera is excited by pretty well anything of human concern, interest and puzzlement. …
Duke Ellington’s America by Harvey G Cohen and Thelonious Monk by Robin DG Kelley: reviews
09 July 2010
Monk’s music (‘Round Midnight’, ‘Ruby, My Dear’) is lovingly documented here. …
The Long Road Home by Ben Shephard: review
25 Apr 2010
The Russian troops who liberated Auschwitz in January 1945 were profoundly disturbed, even revolted by what they saw. …
The Kaiser’s Holocaust by David Olusoga and Casper W Erichsen: review
16 Aug 2010
If the comparisons between colonial Namibia and Nazism do not always quite convince, the book remains a vitally important addition to the ever-growing literature of atrocity and deserves to be read widely. …
Berlin at War by Roger Moorhouse: review
08 Aug 2010
National socialism, with its ritual humiliation of Jews and other ‘asocials’, remains the defining moment in the history of the German people …
Born Brilliant: The Life of Kenneth Williams by Christopher Stevens: review
31 Oct 2010
Kenneth Williams, with his nasal, camp-cockney inflections, was as corny as a whoopee cushion. Yet his death in 1988 at the early age of 62 …
The Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson: review
20 May 2011
In 1977, Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, wrote an article attacking films that he believed falsified the nature of Nazi violence. …
Deep End: A deeply sexy film resurfaces
01 May 2011
Skolimowski’s is a film of tart black comedy and striking visual poetry; a heady brew …
12 Jan 2004
In Victorian times, Dante was held up as a paragon of moral fortitude. His medieval epic of salvation and self-knowledge, The Divine Comedy, was …
17 Aug 2002
Victorian Coren and pornography. Skin flicks, of the sort shown in cheesey dives, used to be associated with men in stained raincoats. Now hardcore is halfway respectable. …
Apr 2011
The Eitingons by Mary-Kay Wilmers: review
20 Dec 2009
Like Hitler before him, Stalin was wary of anyone who appeared ‘cosmopolitan’: Jews, in particular, were seen as a self-regarding, …
The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome By Roland Chambers: review
16 Aug 2009
Arthur Ransome, the sailing enthusiast, amateur angler and author of Swallows and Amazons, was a shadowy figure keen to protect his privacy. …
Review: Fifty Years of Carry On by Richard Webber
19 Sept 2008
Ian Thomson considers a phenomenon as British as fish and chips. Outstandingly vulgar (but rarely crude), the 31 films in the Carry On series mingled end-of-the-pier postcard sauciness with a lewd music-hall banter …
03 May 2008
Ian Thomson reviews My Father’s Country: the Story of a German Family by Wibke Bruhns, tr by Shaun Whiteside; The Zookeeper’s Wife: a Forgotten Tale of Wartime Survival and Resistance by Diane Ackerman; and Clara’s War…
‘Like getting into bed with a smallpox victim’
29 Sept 2007
Ian Thomson reviews The Force of Destiny: a History of Italy since 1796 by Christopher Duggan. Christopher Duggan, a distinguished Italophile and professor of Italian history, describes the Mafia as a grotesque parody …