1+ week, 10+ hour ago   (956+ words) Before starting as a modern history student at the University of Oxford in the early 1980s, Jonathan Carley devoted much of his time to acting. His roles at school ranged from a minor part in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure to playing…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (1179+ words) Peter MacDonald was at a New Mexico boarding school for Navajo children when Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor dragged America into the Second World War. MacDonald, lying about his age, did so " setting himself on a course that would…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago   (1173+ words) On weekend duty around a decade ago, Steve Brown received the message that everyone in his "war detectives" unit at Imjin Barracks in Gloucestershire feared. A Royal Navy submarine with some 150 sailors aboard was missing in "northern seas". Was Britain…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago   (1401+ words) In the final months of the Second World War, as his unit retreated in the face of Allied advances with barely a shot fired, Karl Hoffmann, the German linguist and SS officer, developed a ritual. Once a day, he would…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago   (842+ words) Perched at the foot of the Pyrenees, the medieval stone village of Oloron-Sainte-Marie claims to be the birthplace of the French beret. There was a time when everyone in Oloron was a beret maker, or related to one. It is…...

2+ mon, 9+ hour ago   (1459+ words) In May 1945, Allied soldiers wandered through Adolf Hitler's F'hrerbunker in grim fascination, but one of them spotted a macabre opportunity. Colonel Roswell P Rosengren of the US army, one of General Eisenhower's press officers, fixed his eye on the sofa…...

2+ mon, 2+ week ago   (184+ words) " The 21 best history books of the past year to read next If none of this sounds particularly original, that is because not much of it is. Ullrich's method is to cleave closely to the most reputable secondary sources and leaven…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago   (368+ words) Secrets lurked around the edges of Antony Easton's childhood. His mother seemed relatively straightforward. But his father, Peter Roderick Easton, was "not like other people, a "gruff, often forbidding, inscrutable figure, prone to "dark moods. His three children had only…...

2+ mon, 4+ week ago   (692+ words) Would you like to live in a former Nazi war bunker built by slave labourers, even if it came with a roof terrace and stunning coastal views? The developers who converted a concrete personnel shelter on the Guernsey coast into…...

4+ mon, 4+ day ago   (998+ words) When the victorious allies began setting up a tribunal at Nuremberg to try the remaining leaders of the Nazi regime for crimes against humanity, they had a problem: who would defend these men? The answer presented itself in the shape…...