VJ Day: the forgotten war
The defeat of Japan in August 1945 has become a footnote to Allied victory in Europe. But the world we…
BySecond World War
Churchill’s bunker
Inside the Cabinet War Rooms, where Britain achieved its final victory.
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The warning of VE Day
Eighty years on, a new age of autocracy has made Europe’s defence an urgent question once again.
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How the world stopped Hitler
The Second World War was not just won on the battlefield, but in seemingly marginal regions from Ireland to Iraq.
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The spectre of Winston Churchill
The great wartime leader continues to haunt British politics and identity.
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The myths of Blitz spirit
Steve McQueen’s new film suggests the Second World War was not simply a time of uncomplicated national unity.
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Inside the court of Adolf Hitler
Richard J Evans’s group biography of the Third Reich’s enforcers provides a revelatory account of the Nazi mind.
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Marc Bloch: a warning from Europe’s past
According to Emmanuel Macron, the best analysis of the dangers facing the continent today comes from a French historian who…
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The silent stones of Europe’s wars
Eighty years after D-Day, how should Britain remember those who died?
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Hitler, Putin and the information wars
Peter Pomerantsev’s new book shows how Second World War propaganda tactics are being used by the Kremlin today.
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Coco Chanel’s second coming
The V&A’s exhibition focuses on the designer’s clothes – with little attention given to her equally spectacular life.
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Churchill and the quest for greatness
Throughout his career, Britain’s wartime prime minister studied how other leaders – Roosevelt, Attlee, Stalin and Gandhi – exercised power.
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In defence of “what if?”
Why counterfactual history is an essential tool for understanding the present.
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The month of two D-Days
History will record this deed as an achievement of the highest order.
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How to survive a nuclear holocaust
A luxury hotel protects the affluent in Sven Holm’s Termush, a rediscovered 1967 dystopia that sheds light on our own…
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In 2013, few could have predicted the decade of political convulsions to come
In the ten years since our centenary edition the world has darkened considerably – and war has returned to Europe.
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Babi Yar: a harrowing masterpiece of Ukraine under Nazi rule
Anatoly Kuznetsov’s classic account of the 1941 massacre of Ukrainians is republished as Kyiv suffers the ravages of war again.
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From the NS archive: Back to all that
11 January 1958: Robert Graves and the writing of the two world wars.
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We shouldn’t demonise Winston Churchill – or deify him
The point of history is to see people and situations in the round rather than to succumb to satisfying myths.
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Eric Ravilious’s visions of war and peace in England
The artist, who died 80 years ago, aged 39, found a bucolic beauty even in military action.
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