Neal Ascherson on Berlin in the second world war

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Neil Ascherson writes about Berlin in the current issue of the London Review of Books:

Berlin is a strange, parvenu capital which shakes itself and becomes unrecognisable every few generations. The little Prussian town suddenly becomes the pompous capital of an empire, which collapses into a defeated rump republic, which turns into the powerhouse of the Third Reich, which is bombed shapeless, then divided into two by a wall. And now united again, with a new government centre worthy of that old parvenu pomposity.

Reviewing Ian Buruma's book Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-45, he says of the city during the war:

Berliners were certainly aware that 'Jew trains' were leaving for somewhere whence no passengers returned. Buruma writes that "the desire to look away, to pretend ignorance, to be wilfully oblivious, must have been the norm, even among highly educated Germans." 

As a British wartime child living near secret things and sites, I can remember easily respecting the instruction: "Just forget you saw that!" But years later in Germany, I learned how often young men on leave had confided hideous things they had seen to their mothers or sisters. 

In the last year of the war, as Buruma confirms, the fear that gripped Berliners was not just of military defeat but of vengeance.

In the Britain of 1940 cars were deadlier than German bombs

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Here's a remarkable quotation from a judge that I found in the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette (24 July 1940).

After a defendant had been found not guilty of manslaughter and of dangerous driving, Mr Justice Stable said:

"I hope this will be a warning to him and I hope that he and other members of the public will appreciate that during June the whole forces of the German Empire succeeded in killing exactly 100 fewer people in this island with bombs than were killed by motorists by accidents." 

Kevin Keegan: The humble superstar of the Seventies

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Kevin Keegan made his debut for Scunthorpe United at the age of 17 and played for them for three seasons in the old fourth division. Word soon got round that he was a talent, and managers and scouts from many big clubs came to watch him. Perhaps discouraged by his short stature, none of them took their interest further.

But Bill Shankly did sign him for Liverpool before the start of the 1971/2 season. What made Keegan's name was that Shankly put him straight into the first team, playing just off the tall Welsh striker John Toshack rather than in the midfield role he filled at Scunthorpe, and he was an immediate success. A year later he was playing for England under Alf Ramsey, who did make some funky selections in the dying months of his reign.

During his time at Liverpool, Keegan won three league titles, the European Cup, the FA Cup and the Uefa Cup twice. By 1976 he was England's captain and best player, and the following year he left to play for Hamburg. 

This was an era when hardly any British footballers played abroad, but Keegan made a huge success of it, twice winning the Ballon d'Or, which was effectively the European Player of the Year Award. Keegan returned to England in 1980, playing first for Southampton and then for Newcastle United.

His international career ended in disappointment. In 1982 England qualified for the World Cup Finals for this first time since 1970, but their best two players, Trevor Brooking and Keegan himself, were injured and probably shouldn't have been picked at all. This was a particular blow as the two enjoyed the sort of near-telepathic understanding that Keegan had developed with John Toshack in his early days at Liverpool.

As it was, England won their three group games, and then went through to second group of three teams, along with West Germany and Spain. England played out two goalless draws and failed to progress to the semi-finals, with Keegan only able to play for their last 26 minutes in the tournament.

Keegan's managerial career began at Newcastle United, where he electrified supporters with an attacking brand of football that took the club back into the top division and made them strong contenders for the title. In the end, though, his "don't worry if we let three in because we'll score four" style didn't win trophies, and he was psyched out by the wilier Alex Ferguson. He managed England for 18 months in 1999 and 2000, but resigned admitting that he was not up to the job.

Two more things need to be said. The first is that, while Keegan was undoubtedly a talented player, his prodigious appetite for training was what made him an outstanding one. In his early days at Anfield he upset some of the established players by beating all of them in every single gym test. I don't often remember or quote the words of David Mellor from his days hosting football phone-ins, but when he said Keegan had made himself a better footballer than God had ever intended him to he, he had it about right.

The other thing is that readers today may not realise just what a huge celebrity Keegan was in the Seventies. He released a pop single (it was a hit in Germany where he was then playing), he was a star of the hugely popular BBC television multisport contest Superstars and he advertised Brut alongside Henry Cooper, then the most loved man in British sport. It was the next best thing to being asked to do a television commercial with the Queen Mother.

George Best ('the fifth Beatle') had been a big celebrity in the Sixties, but it was rare before Italia 90 and the advent of the Premiership for footballers to find such fame outside the game. After 1982, for instance, England's captain and best player Bryan Robson was much less famous than Ian Botham.

But in the Seventies Keegan was everywhere. And his personality – hardworking, honest, genuine – made him popular wherever he went.

"His glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice": On being the monarch's second son

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Being the second son of a monarch is a difficult career, because you cease to be of use to the family firm – assuming your older brother has healthy children – when you are still young.

Here's Jonathan Parry writing about Victoria's second son in the London Review of Books in 2020:

The monarch’s younger sons in each generation are fated to follow the same trajectory. Few now remember Prince Alfred – except tourists visiting the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town who assume that its name is a misprint for ‘Albert’. 

In the 1860s Alfred, Victoria’s second son, named after the founder of the English monarchy and, as a naval cadet, the first official imperial tourist, became a global superstar. Aged 14 he visited the Holy Land, a year later he conquered South Africa, and before he was 20 he was seriously proposed as king of Greece. Polkas were written for him. At 23 he toured Australia and survived an Irish assassination attempt; soon afterwards he was fêted in New Zealand, Hong Kong and India. 

But his glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice, he married a haughty Russian princess, and he ended in forced exile presiding over his father’s German duchy.

Discuss with relation to the careers of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Prince Harry (as indeed Parry does).

The Joy of Six 1539

Roz Savage says our electoral system is not just unfair but dangerous: "Manifestos are written for floating voters in constituencies that might change hands – not for the country as a whole. And when governments make spending decisions, the incentive structure pulls them in exactly the same direction. The Towns Fund, which directed 40 of 45 allocations to Conservative-held seats, was not an aberration. It was the system working as designed."

"Some schools have glass atriums, which were a common feature of those constructed during the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme in the early 2000s, but which now give the effect of walking into a Kew hothouse." Harry Paticas explains why hot spells now turn British schools into heat traps.

Jack Meredith says it's time for Liberals and trade unions to talk again: "The last Lib Dem leader to engage seriously with the movement was the late Charles Kennedy, who in September 2002 became the first to address the TUC Congress. Nearly 24 years of near-silence since then is beyond disappointing/"

Simon Skinner reviews a history of the World Cup: "Argentine reverence for Maradona endured because and not in spite of his anti-Corinthian ethos, up to and beyond the point in 1991 that he failed a drugs test when unable to deploy his habitual expedient of squirting someone else’s urine through a prosthetic penis. The penis was later displayed in a Buenos Aires museum as a quasi-religious relic (before being stolen)."

"Plans to moor a large vessel beside London Bridge have run into an unexpected complication – a disused tube tunnel buried beneath the Thames," reports Ian Mansfield.

Maria J. Pérez Cuervo looks at legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and what may lie behnd it: "The Pied Piper, like the Trickster, is a shape-shifter who wears a number of different masks – the psychopath, the hero, the rebel… even Death himself. Like Shakespeare’s Puck or Barrie’s Peter Pan, he spreads a net of enchantment, leading our children to the Otherworld. Whether this Otherworld was a new land to colonise, an altered state of consciousness or the realm of the dead remains a mystery."

A German bombing raid on Dublin in May 1941 killed 28 people

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Here's bit of history I didn't know. The caption for this photograph on Getty Images says:

Emergency services at work in a bomb damaged street in Dublin, Ireland, the day after a German air raid, which killed 34 people, 1st June 1941. The cause of the raid on neutral Ireland remains unclear. 

Wikipedia – it's strange how the advent of AI has changed that site from a near embarrassment to the last online redoubt of human judgement – explains what happened:

In the early morning hours of 31 May 1941, four German bombs fell on north Dublin. That night, a large number of German aircraft were spotted by Irish military observers and searchlights were put up to track them. It was noted that the aeroplanes were not flying in formation but independently in a meandering manner and some appeared to be circling. 

After the German planes did not clear the airspace over Dublin and continued erratically flying over the city, the Irish Army fired warning flares, starting with three flares representing the colours of the Irish flag to inform the pilots they were over neutral territory. followed by several red flares warning them to leave or be fired on. 

After fifteen minutes had passed, the order was given to open fire and Irish anti-aircraft guns began firing at the bombers. Local air defences were weak and the gunners were poorly trained. Although they had shells capable of destroying bomber aircraft, they failed to hit their targets.

Eventually, some of the German planes dropped their bombs. The first three caused many injuries but no fatalities:

The fourth and final bomb, dropped about half an hour later, fell in North Strand, killing 28 people, destroying 17 houses and severely damaging about 50 others, the worst damage occurring in the area between Seville Place and Newcomen Bridge. Ninety people were injured, approximately 300 houses were destroyed or damaged and about 400 people were left homeless.

An article on the Maynooth University site agrees with the figure of 28 fatalities, so I have used that in my headline.

Though some saw the bombing as a warning to Ireland to remain neutral in the war, the most likely explanation is that the bomber crews thought they were bombing Belfast. There were also the inevitable conspiracy theories that Churchill had somehow caused Dublin to be targeted to save British cities from being attacked. Uniquely, in this case Churchill seems to have been their source himself:

After the war Winston Churchill said that "the bombing of Dublin on the night of 30 May 1941, may well have been an unforeseen and unintended result of our interference with 'Y'". He was speaking of the Battle of the Beams, wherein "Y" referred to the direction finding radio signals that the Luftwaffe used to guide their bombers to their targets. 

The technology was not sufficiently developed by mid-1941 to have deflected planes from one target to another and could only limit the ability of bombers to receive the signals.

You can learn more about this "Battle of the Beams" from the links in my recent post on the secret RAF base at Charley in Leicestershire.

The Joy of Six 1475

Degenerate Art on Donald Trump's concentration camps and what can be done to resist their building: "When you consider the number – again, in the tens of millions—that the administration is promising to detain or deport, and when you look at the network of planned facilities that we already know about, what we’re witnessing is the express repetition of a project on the scale of the larger concentration camp systems in history – the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and Chinese labour camps in the People’s Republic of China."

"Westminster’s moral compass went haywire a long time ago, and no party knows how to navigate its way out of the swamp. The political graveyard is full of those who blithely – and fatally – assumed that their troops were cleaner than their opponents." Sam Bright wonders what happened to Keir Starmer's concern about sleaze.

"OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, acknowledged in its own research that large language models will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering." Gyana Swain reports.

Charles Taylor that Holywood's Oscar-winning pictures are not where we should look for art that speaks to the danger of this moment: "In American cinema, it’s always been easier to find real meat in B movies and Westerns and noirs and war movies and melodramas than in their high budget counterparts. Those movies, often made on the cheap for a quick profit, couldn’t avail themselves of the production values that, when it came to thorny topics, too often shellacked the life out of their subjects."

"Mother was given the book to read, but I don’t think she read it, which was probably for the best." Bridget Osborne talks to Simon Surtees, one of the boys who appeared in Peter Brook's 1963 film of Lord of the Flies.

Scandalous History introduces us to three bandit queens of the Wild West: Belle Starr, Pearl Hart and Laura Bullion.

The Joy of Six 1465

"The evidence shows that when local people are involved in welcoming newcomers – helping to secure housing, navigate services, and build early social connections they learn local languages more quickly; move into employment sooner; and become part of community life in ways that benefit everyone." Tony Vaughan, Labour MP for Folkestone and Hythe, calls on his government to publish a clear plan for the implementation of a community sponsorship scheme for refugees.

Lewis Goodall posts some hard truths from Minnesota: "The United States under Trump is no longer our military ally (Greenland), our strategic ally (Ukraine and Russia), our political ally (a National Security Strategy which openly advocates backing far-right parties to disrupt European democracies facing 'civilisational erasure'), nor our economic ally (tariffs)."

"In its manifesto, Labour promised 'to restore and protect our natural world' and 'to unlock the building of homes … without weakening environmental protections'. Sadly, for me and many other Labour supporters, the tone of the language soon changed." David Jobbins says "growth at all costs" is threatening Britain's wildlife.

Jonathan Liew sees England's hapless cricket team as a metaphor for the country: "Of the under-19 squad currently playing in the World Cup in Harare, only four did not come through the private school system, where you are eight times more likely to have access to a turf pitch and 10 times more likely to have a qualified coach. The £35m in grassroots funding announced by Rishi Sunak in 2024 turned out not to exist."

Discontinued Notes comes across an unexpected book – a collection of short stories about wartime Germany by Antony Lambton, a former Conservative minister who resigned after a long-forgotten political scandal in 1973.

"As Colin Harper once observed, Briggs wasn’t just a singer; she was 'the bridge'. She made the ancient oral traditions of the British Isles credible, sexy, and attainable for a generation of icons, including Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny, Led Zeppelin, June Tabor, Christy Moore, Richard Thompson, and Dick Gaughan." KLOF Magazine on the importance of Anne Briggs.

The Joy of Six 1454

"At its core, A Christmas Carol is the transformation of a man without empathy, to a man with empathy. It accomplishes this through forcing the character Ebenezer Scrooge to remember the past, witness the present, and to consider the future. It is through seeing other human beings as human beings with lives equal in worth to his own, that forms the basis of Scrooge's transformation." Scott Santens sets out the science behind Charles Dickens' famous story.

Barbara Speed on the shocking scale of the abuse perpetrated by the Jesus Army: "The ... coroner returned an open verdict, but noted his 'concern' about the two strange deaths and the letters he had received from parents of young people in the fellowship, who were worried about their children’s safety. These incidents were closely reported by local media but never became national news."

Welcome to the working week - Microsoft Teams will soon start telling your boss where you are, reports Zak Doffman.

"I think, therefore I am" isn’t the best translation of Descartes’s famous pronouncement "cogito, ergo sum", argues Galen Strawson.

Owen Hatherley has been watching a new box set of immediately post-war films from the DDR: "'Rubble films' were sponsored by the Soviet occupiers of Eastern Germany and East Berlin as part of the project of de-Nazification, with the theory being that mass market film was uniquely suited to forcing ordinary Germans to understand and come to terms with what they had done. It was a brief moment, necessarily compromised ... but the films are fascinating as attempts to make antifascist commercial blockbusters, in a devastated society that would have preferred to think about almost anything else."

Gavin Speed looks at the latest research into Saxon Leicestershire: "Along the River Welland in south-east Leicestershire, extensive fieldwalking surveys have identified several settlements close to the north of the river, and close to former Roman roads."

Neal Ascheron on Frederick the Great and the draining of the Oderbruch

One of my favourite writers is Neal Ascherson. Among many other achievements, it was he, and not Tony Benn, who came up with the well-known quotation above. (There's chapter and verse on this blog.)

Here is Ascherson reviewing The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany by David Blackbourn for the London Review of Books in 2006 - Frederick is Frederick II (Frederick the Great) of Prussia:

In Frederick’s time, marshlands were regarded as sinister, useless places, breeding malarial vapours and sheltering not only dangerous wild beasts but primitive human beings beyond the reach of law. Today, we would treasure the lost Oderbruch as one of the marvels of Europe. 

On its way to the Baltic, the river frayed into countless shallow channels and lagoons, into swamps, shoals and muddy islands. Twice a year, it flooded up to ten or twelve feet deep, nourishing a dense cover of waterlogged bushes. Here lived ‘an almost unimaginable range of insect, fish, bird and animal life’, including wolves and lynxes. 

Blackbourn has the sense to rely heavily on the travel writings of Theodor Fontane, the most lovable and observant of German writers, who explored the drained Oderbruch in the 1850s and collected memories of pre-reclamation times. Fontane was told of the enormous shoals of countless species of fish, of pike hordes so dense that they could be scooped up in buckets, of crayfish which escaped the hot summer shallows to swarm in trees from which they could be shaken down like plums. 

And he wrote also about the old inhabitants. They were not Germans but Wends, Slavs who had survived in the marshes since the Germans colonised the fertile land almost a thousand years before. The Wends lived on mounds hidden in the swamp, their huts encircled by ramparts of cow-dung which kept out the floods and served as pumpkin beds.

There's more about The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany on the Penguin website.

The Joy of Six 1399

Rei Takver reports on fears that Labour’s new data access law would allow a future Reform UK government to replicate an Elon Musk-style DOGE data-grab: "If Reform gains power in 2029, campaigners say it could use Labour’s data access law to carry out its policies, which include a crackdown on immigration, the radical downsizing of the civil service, eliminating 'government waste', and decimating the UK’s net zero projects."

The British right is adopting an increasingly extreme form of ethnic identity politics, while failing to explain what the rest of us are supposed to be so worried about, argues Jonathan Portes.

Toby Buckle insists American liberals should stop trying to act as the referees of political debate and recognise that they are partisans for one side of it: "The liberalism of the early twentieth century was a project aimed at social reform. That of the mid-century – of the New Deal, Great Society, and civil rights eras  – while certainly complicit in many of the evils of its world, was also a creed with a strong sense of its own values. Far from being content to 'neutrally' enforce existing rights, it sought to expand them and create new ones."

Katy Holland says The Sound of Music has never been popular in Austria because it challenges the way the country likes to paint itself as a victim of Nazi Germany: "Austrian officials, sensitive to the implications of wartime collaboration, initially objected to the use of swastika banners in Salzburg to depict the Anschluss, and relented only when filmmakers proposed using archival footage of Hitler being welcomed by cheering crowds in the city."

"Slag heap debris on the English coast has apparently been fusing into a new kind of sedimentary rock. A team of geologists studying the beach recently 'found a series of outcrops made from an unfamiliar type of sedimentary rock. The beach used to be sandy, so the rock must have been a recent addition.' ... Based on inclusions of trash amongst the sediments, such as a discarded coin, some of this rock could not have been more than 36 years old.'" BLDGBLOG has news of rapid geological change.

"There is only ten years between the two tv adaptations but technically a lot apparently happened in that ten years. The Children of Green Knowe looks as fresh as ever; it’s very difficult to believe that it is thirty years old. A Traveller in Time, only eight years older, looks visually awful." Maureen Kincaid Speller compares and contrasts television adaptations of two children's books.

Hitler and Mussolini both claimed to have killed Nessie

The Loch Ness monster became a popular newspaper story in the 1930s. The result of this was that, in an attempt to undermine British morale, both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy claimed to have killed Nessie.

The Aberdeen Press and Journal reported in December 1940 on Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' 'Monster Fairy Tale', saying: "It is reported from Glasgow, via Stockholm, that the Loch Ness monster has struck a mine, and its body has been found washed ashore in pieces on the west of Scotland." 

Perhaps unsatisfied with the lack of reaction from that news, a The World's News article published in 1941 reported that Italian newspaper Popolo d'ltalia claimed an Italian pilot had "bombed and destroyed a huge, serpent-like animal on the surface of Loch Ness". 

The illustration above shows Ruttie, the Rutland Water Monster. Lord Bonkers tells me she was wounded in an encounter with a U-boat, but made a full recovery.

Book Review... How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler by Peter Pomerantsev

This review appears in the new issue of Liberator. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler

Peter Pomerantsev

Faber, 2025; £10.99

In September 1941 German civilians began to pick up enticing new radio broadcasts. In the salty language of an army veteran from Berlin, ‘Der Chef’ complained bitterly about food rationing and excoriated leading Nazis as inefficient and sexually corrupt. “It’s a pity we can’t cut our meat from the buttocks of the SS.”

But Der Chef was not a disaffected insider: he was in reality Peter Hans Seckelmann, a German political exile broadcasting from Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire under the control of the British black propagandist Sefton Delmer.  

It is Delmer’s story that Pomerantsev tells – his boyhood in Germany during the First World War; his time as a journalist there during the Thirties when he became close to the Nazi leadership; his difficulties in proving to the British authorities that he was loyal and that his skills should be used.

Though Der Chef was a crude character, he was used in subtle ways. When he complained, for instance, that some German civilians were getting round rationing by buying clothes on the black market, his broadcast was designed to normalise this behaviour, encourage more people to take it up and speed the breakdown of the rationing system.

As the war went on, Delmer invented more characters and radio stations. Father Elmar – a real priest, though Austrian not German as claimed – broadcast religious programmes about the sins of the Nazi regime, emboldening believers with their own doubts about Hitler. And Delmer devised a whole station that combined subtle propaganda with a supply of genuine news about the home front and the welfare of troops that no German station could match. Ian Fleming, for instance, then working in Naval intelligence, fed him the results of the U-boat football league. Another writer, Muriel Spark, was on Delmer’s staff and later drew on this experience for her novel The Hothouse by the East River.

Pomerantsev shares Delmer’s experience of growing up in both liberal and authoritarian cultures. He is the son of political dissidents from Kyiv, was born in Ukraine and grew up in London. Early in this century, he lived in Moscow and worked as a TV producer. He sometimes draws parallels between Putin’s propaganda and that deployed by the Nazis or Delmer. His readers may be left wondering if some of Delmer’s tactics could be adopted by those seeking to counter the far right today.

Jonathan Calder 

The Joy of Six 1381

"Any real 'change' promised in Labour’s manifesto has been betrayed by a continuity with tired and damaging tropes of deserving and undeserving people. This is contributing to the sense, a year in, that this Labour government is merely repeating past government failures rather than striking out in a new direction." George Newth identifies the paradox at the heart of Keir Starmer's first year in power.

Aisha K. Gill sets out how we can make sure that the new grooming gangs inquiry is the last.

Andrea Pitzer on why we shouldn't talk about 'Alligator Alcatraz': "It’s not just a new prison, Alcatraz or otherwise. I visited four continents to write a global history of concentration camps. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed."

"While terms like 'gaslighting' have existed in therapeutic practice for decades or longer, most only started to become common lingo within the past few years, fuelled by use on social-media platforms. One viral Reddit post or TikTok video is all it takes for the masses to latch onto a previously overlooked word." Angela Haupt picks 10 such terms and explains their precise meaning, which can soon be lost when they escape the consulting room.

"Despite extensive state support for over-the board chess, the longed-for international ascendancy was never to return. Furthermore, no significant new talents emerged apart possibly from Klaus Junge; as Taylor Kingston shows, this contrasts tellingly with the Soviet Union whose policies quickly generated a massive growth in registered players, as well as world-beating players who would become dominant after the war." Tim-Jake Gluckman reviews a new book on chess in the Third Reich.

Dan Liebke considers the overlap between cricket and comic books, and asks if Ben Stokes is Alan Moore.

The Joy of Six 1372

"What's happening in Gaza is a humanitarian and existential tragedy for the people living there, a moral and political disaster for Israel, the indirect, long-term result of past European barbarism and the subject of a damaging present European failure." Timothy Garton Ash reflects on European double standards and German cognitive dissonance.

Séamas O'Reilly reports from Ballymena: "To their credit, the PSNI have been clear-cut on this point, with the chair of their police federation Liam Kelly describing the violence as 'mindless, unacceptable and feral' and the actions of the rioters as 'a pogrom'. There is no interpretation of these acts, no nuance or context that can be added, that points in any other direction.

Hannah Al-Othman and Jessica Murray on increasing concerns over the quality of 'expert witness' evidence in British courts.

"I wanted to go back into the past and look at it with fresh eyes, to better understand the roots of this uncertainty. What I began to find was twofold: first, there were major shifts in power during the 1980s and ’90s – primarily away from politics and mostly toward finance, though also other areas. Second, there was a significant internal shift in consciousness. We are very different creatures from the human beings of 1978." Frieze interviews Adam Curtis about his new television series Shifty.

The car made pedestrians second-class citizens, and we shouldn't let driverless vehicles push us off the road altogether, says Adam Tranter.

Northolt Park Racecourse near Harrow was superbly equipped and the headquarters of pony racing in Britain, yet it had an active life of only 11 years. This local history site tells its story.

The Joy of Six 1355

"It needs to restore its reputation for economic credibility, which means that it cannot deny the damage done by Brexit – and support measures to mitigate that damage by moving closer to the EU.  It should be willing to be very critical of Donald Trump.  And it needs to wholeheartedly make the case against Reform and Farage not on tactical grounds - 'vote Reform, get Labour' - but because it is a very bad idea to get Reform at all." David Gauke charts a path to recovery for the Conservatives, but doubts they will take it.

Simon Fletcher fears Keir Starmer's rightward shift is laying the ground for Nigel Farage: "It is the Government’s current direction that is the problem, not its rapidity. Further and faster down the wrong path is the height of political wrong-headedness. The repeated lesson of Labour governments - and indeed left of centre governments around the world - is that voters expect them to improve their living standards and when they do not, they withdraw their support."

James Hawes argues that we should not be surprised that AfD polls so well in eastern Germany. For reasons rooted in history, voters there have chosen authoritarian parties ever since they got the vote.

"As a chartered psychologist, I decided to read Spare to learn more about a topic that deeply interests me; the adverse childhood experiences of children from materially privileged homes. This topic is thoroughly addressed within the text. However, I didn’t predict that I would be left with such an aching sadness for Harry, his brother and his mother and to some extent his father; normal, flawed human beings trapped and tormented within a crumbling, cruelly dysfunctional gilded cage." Pam Jarvis reads Prince Harry's book.

Simon Matthews watches Ridley Scott's The Duellists from 1977.

"The helmet was made of iron covered with silver and gilt, consistent with early Imperial Roman cavalry helmet types found on the Continent. Over 1000 coins in the same pit provide a mid-1st century date, suggesting that the helmet was buried at the same time as the coins in the entranceway. The reason why the helmet was buried within a British shrine remains uncertain – it may have belonged to a Briton serving in the Roman army, or was possibly a diplomatic gift." The Hallaton Fieldwork Group on the discovery of an Iron Age shrine outside this Leicestershire village.

The Joy of Six 1352

"He inherited an economy from Wilson suffering from low growth and high inflation which threatened to destroy all Callaghan and his party held dear. 'There are,' he told MPs on his election, 'no soft options facing Britain.' His solution - attacked by the left as the one Conservatives would have followed - was to reduce public spending while encouraging private sector investment." Steven Fielding argues that Jim Callaghan is the prime minister Keir Starmer most resembles.

"Both sides of the culture war profited from caricatures of Francis as Pope Woke. The reality was less clear-cut. He distrusted the liberal impulse to make the church a vague, hand-wringing Roman branch of the human rights campaign. His positions on war, free-market exploitation and climate change were all in the mainstream of Catholic Social Teaching, though articulated with unusual directness and clarity. His interviews often gave the impression that he thought the church’s hang-ups about sexuality were just that - symptoms of an un-Christlike clerical trend to flee from real humanity." James Butler on Pope Francis.

Eliza Apperly examines how Hilter's favourite film director, Leni Riefenstahl, spent a lifetime covering up her central role in the Nazi propaganda machine.

"The story of the divide between the right and left brain has become one of the most cherished ideas in psychotherapy. It shows up virtually everywhere we look, branching into a myriad of techniques and approaches, creating an entire ecosystem." But, ask Pascal Vrticka and Ana Lund, is there any truth in this story?

Keith Frankish remembers the philosopher Daniel Dennett: "Dan didn’t see philosophy as a specialism remote from everyday life or distinct from the work of scientists. He saw it as an attempt to see how science and everyday reality fit together - how a world of subatomic particles obeying strict physical laws could at the same time be a world of free, conscious agents, with thoughts, hopes and dreams."

The Digital Dickens Notes Project allows you to explore the working notes Charles Dickens kept as he wrote his novels in monthly or weekly installments. In as few as 19 pages per novel, his notes are concise, dynamic records of Victorian serial composition.

The Joy of Six 1323

Hannah Forsyth surveys the history of the commercialisation of higher education and concludes: "Universities need to be democratic in both structure and purpose."

John Cromby complains that left-wing political commentators treat psychiatric diagnoses as uncontroversial: "This has the effect of reifying psychiatric diagnoses – of making them appear more real, more concrete, more legitimate. It also works to undermine critiques: of diagnosis, and of psychiatry more generally."

"G.K. Chesterton once wrote that journalism was, 'saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive'." A hundred-and-some years later that sounds rather quaint. Today, it’s asking three different sources with a vested interest in the matter whether Lord Jones is in fact dead, and posting their contradictory answers in real-time as you receive them." Martin Robbins argues that Donald Trump - and Robert Peston - have broken the news, and that it's probably time to rethink your information diet.

Many of the oligarchs who supported Hitler ended up in concentration camps, reports Timothy W. Ryback.

David Trotter reviews the new British Film Institute book on Ken Loach's Kes (1969): "Kes marked a conscious departure from the 'go-in-and-grab-it' style of Up the Junction. The aim now was to observe, sympathetically, at a distance, but still with a view to avoiding as far as possible any suspicion of extensive rehearsal."

"In the popular imagination, Birmingham isn’t thought of as an artistic bohemia. The city’s historic stereotype, judging by the backdrop to the likes of Peaky Blinders or the risible Tolkien biopic from 2019, is summed up by no-nonsense men bashing iron in huge factories, often to a heavy metal soundtrack." But there's more to the city than that, says Jon Neale as he looks at the role of the Arts and Crafts movement in its history.

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi

Then again...

I love this: you hardly need to ask for subtitles. German satire could be the trend of 2025. 

The comforting lie de Gaulle told France after the second world war

This blog's hero Neal Ascherson has a piece in the new London Review of Books. It's a review of Julian Jackson's France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain.

Pétain, a hero of the first world war, headed the collaborationist Vichy regime after the German invasion during the second. After the Allied victory, he was tried for treason, convicted and sentenced to death. Because of his age (he was 89), this was commuted to life imprisonment and he died in 1951.

Ascherson writes of the detailed charges bought against Pétain:

Nothing shows better than this trial the way perspectives on the Second World War have changed almost out of recognition in the course of the last eighty years. In much of the world, children can now leave school vaguely believing that the war was fought to save the Jews from the Holocaust. 

But in 1945 Pétain’s indictment included only a brief mention of ‘abominable racial laws’, referring to Vichy’s antisemitic discrimination, and said nothing specific about the mass round-ups and deportations to the gas chambers that were made possible by the collaboration of French police, ministry officials and railway managers.

Incredibly, no Jewish survivors of the camps stood as witnesses at the trial. Antisemitism lay somewhere in the background here, but more immediately important was de Gaulle’s shamelessly misleading version of French behaviour under the occupation. 

Almost everyone, it ran, had supported the Resistance in thought if not in deed, and France had been let down only by a small clique of traitors. This new myth plastered over the fact that Vichy and its policy of keeping the Germans contented had been accepted, with intense and bitter reluctance, by most of the population during the early war years.