Articles by Henry Elkins

Last week Dan  Snow presented a three-part series on the World War Two raid on the dams that protected the Ruhr Valley the industrial heartland of Germany. Snow like his father Peter on election night with his swingometer is given to somewhat histrionic hand gestures. He is not a calm presenter [...]

The 75th anniversary of The Nuremberg Trial was celebrated with a three part programme on Channel 5 in the week. It relied more on footage of the trial  than a narrator. Philippe Sands, a human rights barrister who wrote an excellent book on one of the main jurists present Eli Lauterpacht called [...]

There is a tendency in covering World War One to which I plead guilty of limiting our interest to the loss of young life in the trench warfare. This excellent series gave a much broader canvas and I was particularly interested in 1916-18. With war bogged down in the trenches of northern France and [...]

I promise you this is the last review you will have to read of HBO’s Plot Against America but the editor asked me to put it in a historical context. I have to start with the observation that this was not a documentary but a drama based on the fiction of Philip Roth. This said, a number of [...]