Geoffrey Wheatcroft | The New York Review of Books

Europe’s Most Terrible Years

For Germans, World War II began with deceit and cruelty and ended in physical and moral desolation.

Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II

by Roger Moorhouse

“Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself”: The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945

by Florian Huber, translated from the German by Imogen Taylor

December 17, 2020 issue

Coronation portrait of George IV by Thomas Lawrence, 1821

A Discriminating Dissolute

George IV: Art and Spectacle

an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, November 15, 2019–May 3, 2020; and the Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, October 16, 2020–April 5, 2021

George IV: King in Waiting

by Stella Tillyard

May 28, 2020 issue

The Opportunist Triumphant

February 13, 2020 issue

The First Concentration Camps

November 7, 2019 issue

Near Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, West Germany, 1961

Don McCullin’s Art of War

“I do tend to turn my landscapes into battlefields,” photographer Don McCullin says, so that the empty fields, some waterlogged, below Glastonbury Tor, might be the devastated Somme. Even his still lifes of plums and mushrooms have a brooding quality.

March 15, 2019

‘Feasting with Panthers’

The Happy Prince

a film written and directed by Rupert Everett

Oscar: A Life

by Matthew Sturgis

March 21, 2019 issue

A Royal Air Force Lancaster bomber during a night raid over Hamburg, Germany, 1943

One Hundred Years of Destruction

RAF: The Birth of the World’s First Air Force

by Richard Overy

Aerial Warfare: The Battle for the Skies

by Frank Ledwidg

December 20, 2018 issue

A mural in London’s East End by the street artist Kalen Ockerman, known as Mear One. It was erased in 2012 because of concerns that it was anti-Semitic.

Bad Company

June 28, 2018 issue

A Star Is Born

Churchill

a film directed by Jonathan Teplitzky

Darkest Hour

a film directed by Joe Wright

January 18, 2018 issue

Cruise O’Brien at 100

Conor Cruise O’Brien has been called one of those people whose role it is to be brilliantly wrong, but he was right often enough.

December 26, 2017

Eric Ravilious: Two Women in a Garden, 1933

The Rural Vision of Ravilious & Friends

What’s striking, and significant, is the appeal some of the neo-Romantic artists exert today, in an age that has no proper memory of war, and that yearns for what may partly be an imaginary past.

December 15, 2017

Chris Froome during the Vuelta a España race, August 27, 2016

Loving the Vicious Race

With the start of the Vuelta a España on August 19, Chris Froome, who won this year’s Tour de France, will be attempting to become the first cyclist to win the Tour-Vuelta double in the same year since 1978.

August 17, 2017

George W. Bush and Tony Blair at Hillborough Castle, near Belfast, Northern Ireland, April 2003

How Bad Was Tony Blair?

Assessing the former prime minister’s record

January 19, 2017 issue

George W. Bush and Tony Blair at a joint press conference at Hillsborough Castle, near Belfast, Northern Ireland, April 2003

Tony Blair’s Eternal Shame

In the end Blair isn’t a messiah or a madman or a monster. He’s an utter mediocrity.

The Report of the Iraq Inquiry

by a Committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Sir John Chilcot

Not the Chilcot Report

by Peter Oborne

Broken Vows: Tony Blair: The Tragedy of Power

by Tom Bower

October 13, 2016 issue

Exchange

Brian Barder

How Bad Was Tony Blair?

Assessing the former prime minister’s record

January 19, 2017 issue

Winston Churchill and his daughter Sarah laying bricks at their house in Chartwell, Kent, September 1928

Churchill: Great and Mean

No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money

by David Lough

Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill

by Sonia Purnell

June 9, 2016 issue

Horace Walpole’s country house, Strawberry Hill, in the nineteenth century

Walpole: The House & the Letters

Strawberry Hill and Horace Walpole: Essential Guide

by John Iddon

Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Castle

by Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi

The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence

edited by W.S. Lewis and others

Place-making for the Imagination: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill

by Marion Harney

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill

edited by Michael Snodin

Horace Walpole’s Description of the Villa at Strawberry-Hill: A Facsimile of the Copy Extra-illustrated for Charles Bedford in the Collection of Lord Waldegrave of North Hill

with an introduction by William Waldegrave

Houghton Revisited: The Walpole Masterpieces from Catherine the Great’s Hermitage

by Larissa Dukelskaya and others

A Description of the Villa at Strawberry-Hill

by Horace Walpole, with an introduction by Stephen Clarke

A Different Kind of Weather: A Memoir

by William Waldegrave

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February 25, 2016 issue

British Prime Minister David Cameron and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon meeting for the first time since the general election, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 15, 2015

Britain: The Implosion

June 25, 2015 issue

It Was in the ‘Kyiv Post’

February 19, 2015 issue

How the Murdoch Gang Got Away

Nick Davies’s ‘Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch’

Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch

by Nick Davies

January 8, 2015 issue

Letter

Askold Krushelnycky

It Was in the ‘Kyiv Post’

February 19, 2015 issue

The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, 1871; photograph by Alexander Bassano

The Hedonist King Who Knew His Place

The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince

by Jane Ridley

Royal Cousins at War

a BBC documentary directed by Richard Sanders

September 25, 2014 issue