Second world war

To most people, the salient qualities of Gertrude Stein are unreadability combined with monumental self-belief. This is the woman who once remarked that ‘the Jews have produced only three original geniuses – Christ, Spinoza and myself’. Of the reading aloud of her works, Harold Acton complained: ‘It was difficult not to fall into a trance.’ Even if you are as good a writer as Francesca Wade, it is still difficult to avoid the influence of what she herself calls Stein’s ‘haze of words’. So the first half of this impressively researched biography is cerebral rather than colourful. Stein’s writing career really began when, aged 28 (she was born in 1874),

As a young child in the mid-1960s, Cécile Desprairies listened hour after hour to her mother Lucie dreamily recalling the 1940s, dwelling on a past peopled by undefined heroes and ‘the bastards’ who murdered them. Names were rarely mentioned or hastily passed over. In the fashionable Paris apartment there were daily gatherings – her mother, aunt, cousin and grandmother twittering like birds, obsessed with fashion and cosmetics. Between trying on clothes, there was endless looking back at a lost golden age and lamenting the disasters that followed. Lucie was always in charge, her second husband Charles, Cécile’s father, casually excluded. There was gossip about acquaintances, women with Jewish names described

The second world war was won in the cafés of central Europe – the intellectual milieu that produced Edward Teller, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, and before them Albert Einstein. But even though America was an alluring destination, many of the 1930s escapees from Nazism ended up in Britain. There were scientists in their number, too, but Owen Hatherley concentrates on the newcomers’ effect on how post-war Britain looked. He examines their role in photography and film; in the design of printed books; in art, especially public art; and in architecture and town planning. Perry Anderson’s 1968 essay ‘Components of the National Character’ was dismissive of the impact of the

You need only mild interest in the second world war to be aware of the Arctic convoys of 1941-45, escorted by the Royal Navy through savage weather and unimaginable cold to deliver supplies to Russia. Their purpose was to keep Russia in the war; the conditions were such that storms could last nine days, blowing ships hundreds of miles apart and playing havoc with communications. That’s not to mention enemy action by submarine, air attack and large surface raiders such as the Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. Some 4.5 million tons of aid were delivered at the expense of 119 ships and 2,763 lives lost.  Was it worth it? Opinion at the

Jonathan Raban, who died earlier this year, left this memoir almost complete. It tells two stories, artfully braided. One concerns the first three years of the author’s parents’ marriage, when Peter Raban was abroad serving in the second world war. He rose to become a major in the Royal Artillery, fighting in France and Belgium, evacuated from Dunkirk and proceeding to North Africa, Italy and Palestine. The second is about the author’s stroke in 2011, aged 69, his rehabilitation in a neurological ward where, on his first morning, a nurse asked ‘Do you want to go potty now?’, and the start of a new life as a hemiplegic. Raban had