In June 1933, the 24-year-old Martha Dodd, the daughter of the newly appointed American ambassador to Berlin, arrived in the German capital with her parents and older brother. She knew little and cared less about politics. To her, Adolf Hitler, who had just seized supreme power in Germany, was merely ‘a clown who looked like
Early on Christmas morning in 1962, the Indian diplomat S.S. Banerjee heard a mysterious knock on his door in Dacca, East Pakistan. Standing outside in the darkness was a 14-year-old boy, who beckoned to him to follow, and minutes later Banerjee found himself opposite the firebrand politician Mujibur Rahman, a pipe-smoking Bengali activist who had
At the end of John Boyne’s novel Earth, Evan Keogh, a conscience-stricken young footballer, hands evidence of his connivance in a rape to the police. Two years earlier, he and his teammate Robbie had been found innocent of the charge by a jury, whose foreperson was Dr Freya Petrus. Freya, a consultant in a hospital
‘We are all goalkeepers now,’ declares Robert McCrum, and who could seriously argue with that? Every day we try to defend our own goal against the hurtling ball of fate, but too often end up fishing it out of the back of the net. Then again, we are also all strikers, hopefully hoofing, occasionally taking
I am an absolute sucker for a handsome reproduction of a rare and highly illustrated natural history, preferably more than two centuries old. This may possibly be a niche interest, but Catesby’s Natural History was pronounced a wonder when it was first published and is a wonder still. Mark Catesby was ‘a procurer of plants’,
