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History

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

The Dambusters /Channel 5

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 [...]

December 5, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Nuremberg Trial

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 [...]

December 4, 2020 // 0 Comments

Keeping a perspective

As most Rusters will be only too well aware, we oldies often have to make difficult decisions in order to negotiate a careful balancing act between – on the one hand – expressing our bewilderment that the young seem to delight in disregarding or overturning all we know and can teach them about [...]

November 27, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Crown/Netflix

Largely out of curiosity I watched the first two episodes of The Crown.   I was particularly curious to see whether my recollection of events tallied with those of the series. In one event, the murder of Prince Louis Mountbatten (played by Charles Dance), they did not. I recall feeling a deep [...]

November 17, 2020 // 0 Comments

What’s in a name?

It’s my practice as a working housewife to do my ironing at midday whilst listening to the Radio 3 programme hosted by Donald Macleod on lives of great composers. This week he features the American jazz pianist James Johnson, chiefly known for writing the Charleston. I was intrigued to learn he [...]

November 10, 2020 // 0 Comments

Book review (a curate’s egg)

I bought Robert Colls’ new book This Sporting Life: Sport & Liberty in England, 1760-1960 about three months ago after both reading a review of it in one of the Sunday newspapers and having it recommended to me by a pal because of my general interest in boxing and its forebear – [...]

October 21, 2020 // 0 Comments

Facing the facts

It fascinates me how the human race always presumes in the present that life as it is will never change and yet simultaneously also manages to embrace the new – technology, fashion, media obsessions, medical breakthroughs et al. – as it comes along with varying degrees of enthusiasm ranging [...]

October 12, 2020 // 0 Comments

World War One/PBS

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 [...]

October 6, 2020 // 0 Comments

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