Blog
Seeing the footage of a bloodied Donald Trump this last weekend, as he narrowly survived an attempted assassination in Pennsylvania, had me thinking about another of history’s near-misses. On April 7 1926, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was moving through the crowd in Campidoglio Square in central Rome, having just addressed a meeting of Italian surgeons, […]
You probably haven’t heard of Nicolo Bombacci. I hadn’t. But his life was an interesting one. In fact it was almost a real time example of the Chinese line about “living in interesting times”. He most certainly did that. Bombacci was born in rural poverty in the province of Romagna – the east side of […]
Two pieces caught my eye, this morning, as I was trying to make sense of the strange world we all now inhabit. The first was by Douglas Murray, on the subject of Big Tech, and their encroachments into the realm of censorship. I’m a fan of Murray’s. He is a rare example of a clear-eyed […]
It’s a scenario that will seem quite familiar to us today. A revolutionary rogue state, bent on world domination, spreading its ideology and influence as far as it can, by fair means or foul. But, 100 years ago this month, it was revolutionary Russia that was hitting the headlines for its expansionist ambitions, and it was […]
I was very pleased to be invited to the UK premiere of “Darkest Hour” last night in London. The film by Joe Wright, with Gary Oldman as Churchill, broadly follows the circumstances of Churchill’s accession to the post of Prime Minister in May 1940, as military reverses in France forced the previous incumbent, Neville Chamberlain, […]
My grandfather – Capt. Stanley Millar – was in the RAMC (Royal Army Medical Corps) during World War Two. Already a GP before the war, he joined up in 1939 and served right the way through – France 1940, North Africa, Italy, and back into France in 1944. I’ve often idly wondered what it must […]
One of the effects of the return of the execrable crudfest that is “Hunting Hitler” is that all manner of conspiracists come out of the woodwork – on Twitter and elsewhere – to air their preposterous theories, in sympathy with the nonsense spouted by the dubious “experts” that front the show. In amongst that cornucopia […]
The Estonian film “1944” was released to huge acclaim in 2015 and was submitted as that country’s entry for the 2015 Academy Awards as best foreign film, has now been released in the UK (with subtitles), under the title “1944 – Forced to Fight”. It is set against the backdrop of Estonia’s unenviable fate during […]
Hitler – cynics say – is the gift that keeps on giving. He still holds us all, it seems, in his awful thrall. We are fascinated and appalled by him in equal measure. But we should perhaps also be grateful – grateful that, where once he inspired genocide and war, now he just inspires occasionally […]
Bloody typical! You wait 40 years for a film about the wartime assassination of Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, and then two come along at once… The first of these – “Anthropoid” – I saw last night. And it is very good. It follows the story of Heydrich’s two assassins – Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan) and Jozef Gabčík (Cillian Murphy) – […]
Yesterday, British politics was plunged into an improbable, yet nonetheless frenzied discussion of Adolf Hitler and Zionism. Despite the multifarious threats of ISIS, the Migration Crisis, the EU’s slow-motion car crash and the faltering world economy – journalists were quoting Mein Kampf and dissecting the finer points of Hitler’s policies towards the Jews. The reason for this […]
On the day that Michel Houellebecq’s controversial new novel Soumission (“Submission”) was published in France last year – January 7 – Islamist cretins chose to attack the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo – murdering 12 people. As publicity stunts go, this must top the lot. “Submission” is a dark tale, set in 2022, in which France is […]