Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Sheer Love of the Music

Under the direction of Amelia Freedman, for sixty years the Nash Ensemble has both venerated chamber music’s history and embraced the shock of the new.

Lights, Camera, Royals!

Portraitists of kings and queens have long struggled to address a paradox: royalties are different but ordinary, or ordinary but different.

A Tenuous Mandate

Labour’s landslide victory in the British elections was achieved with only a third of the popular vote. Will the new government be able to steer Britain out of crisis after fourteen years of failed Tory policies?

The Unwilling Celebrity

Maurice Samuels’s Alfred Dreyfus is a biography of the very private man at the center of one of the greatest public controversies of modern times.

The Collaborator in Chief

The trial of Marshal Philippe Pétain was also implicitly a trial of the millions of French men and women who may have disliked the German occupation but who compromised with it and obeyed Vichy.

Bloody Panico

The British Conservative Party was once one of the great popular political movements of Europe. What happened?

The Limits of Press Power

To what extent did newspapers influence public opinion in the US and Britain before and during World War II?

An Unexpectedly Modern Monarch

Despite his mundane outlook and stiff conventionality, George V may have ensured the survival of the British monarchy in a turbulent century.

Mogul of Mystery

Robert Maxwell’s improbable transformation from yeshiva boy to British media baron and outrageous swindler.

Europe’s Most Terrible Years

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

A Discriminating Dissolute

The Opportunist Triumphant

The First Concentration Camps

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.

‘Feasting with Panthers’

One Hundred Years of Destruction

To have seen devastating bombing as the only way through was forgivable in the dire circumstances of 1940, but by the beginning of 1942 defeat was no longer feared.

Bad Company

A Star Is Born

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.

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.