The unlikely link between Nuremberg and The Devil Wears Prada
In the aftermath of Peter Magyar’s victory in Hungary, while I watch people dancing in the streets as they celebrate Viktor Orban’s dramatic ousting, I think of my Hungarian grandparents. As Holocaust survivors, they were the lucky ones, and they remained proud Hungarians to the end. They would have greeted this election with characteristic realism: Minden csoda harom napig tart, as the saying goes. Every miracle lasts three days.
Hungary is a country still feeling the long aftershocks of the second world war and the Holocaust. Those shocks seem clearer than ever after the years I have spent researching The Nuremberg Women, my new book on the trials. We all have an image of those trials in our head: the famous men judging and being judged in the courtroom, immortalised in photographs, or in Laura Knight’s painting, which is on permanent display at the Imperial War Museum. Women are pushed to the margins. But so many intriguing women played their part, from Knight herself to Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, the French Resistance hero who gave the most devastating testimony of the trial.
Keir Starmer is prosecuting a relentless campaign against reality
Did Keir Starmer watch the same Olly Robbins as me?
The changing economics of war
Anyone who launches a new book is hoping desperately that no other big cultural event will come along and eclipse it. So imagine........
