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Articles by Henry Elkins

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About Henry Elkins

A keen researcher of family ancestors, Henry will be reporting on the centenary of World War One. More Posts

Countdown to surrender/PBS

It’s an interesting issue as to why and how capably the German army fought in the latter stages of World War Two when there was little chance of successful resistance. The answer was supplied in this excellent documentary. The most telling reason was Adolf Hitler himself who not only thought [...]

July 29, 2021 // 0 Comments

Stonehenge – potential new ‘discovery’

Trawling the newspaper websites overnight I came across this piece by David Leafe on the website of the Daily Mail and thought it worthy of possible interest to Rusters. It is all about the latest theory as to both the design and purpose of Stonehenge – see here – DAILY [...]

July 3, 2021 // 0 Comments

Quartered but safe/George MacDonald Fraser

Pursuing my interest in the less well known theatres of conflict of World War Two, I received this enthusiastic recommendation from a solicitor friend of mine. It’s a personal account by the author of the Flashman series of the Burma Campaign of 1946 and is extremely good. It dispelled many [...]

June 23, 2021 // 0 Comments

Operation Pedestal/Max Hastings

Pursuing my interest in the lesser known theatres of war in World War Two I read Max Hastings’ account of the fleet that battled to Malta in 1942 with great interest and enjoyment as it’s well researched and most readable. After significant defeats at Singapore and Tobruk in 1942, [...]

June 1, 2021 // 0 Comments

Great Lives/Harry Hopkins

Radio 4’s Great Lives can can be very variable. As often as not the subject is some female trail-blazer of whom I have never heard. Yesterday Matthew Parris presented an episode on Harry Hopkins advocated by Jonathan Dimbleby a respected historian of World War Two. Harry Hopkins was the [...]

May 5, 2021 // 0 Comments

Queen Elizabeth and the Spy in the Household/Channel 4

This was a typical Channel 4 documentary- long on revelation, short on evidence for it. The programme made two significant such revelations, namely that the Queen was complicit in the cover up of Anthony Blunt and his immunity from prosecution and, secondly, the spy delivered a hot dossier on the [...]

April 6, 2021 // 0 Comments

V2/Robert Harris

Popular historical fiction writer Robert Harris spent the lockdown researching this novel about the V2 rocket. There are two strands to the narrative. The novel begins with a V2 rocket hitting Warwick Court in London where Kay, a reconnaissance analyst for the RAF, is having an affaire with one of [...]

March 30, 2021 // 0 Comments

The Infiltrators /Norman Ohler

I have always been interested in the degree of complicity of the German people – das Volk – in Nazism and its crimes and conversely the resistance domestically to the regime. This readable and well-researched account of two such resistants – Harro Schultze-Boysen and his wife [...]

January 19, 2021 // 0 Comments

A first hand account

At noon midday this week on Thursday 17th December in Knightsbridge the auction house Bonham’s will be holding its latest auction of fine books, atlases, manuscripts and historical photographs. Included in the sale is the handwritten account of the famous siege of Rorke’s Drift in South [...]

December 15, 2020 // 0 Comments

In the Garden of Beasts/Erik Larson

This is the true story of the American Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, appointed at the time of Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy to total power in 1933-44. Erik Larson (author) William Dodd was a mild-mannered history professor from Chicago who studied in Leipzig. He described himself as a [...]

December 9, 2020 // 0 Comments

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