Sublime

When at last the walls were breached, the Norman commander Tancred of Hauteville (d.1112) promised protection for the city’s inhabitants; but the crusader army disregarded his orders and – on entering the city – indiscriminately massacred Muslims, Jews and Arab Christians, not sparing women and children. The scale of the atrocity can scarcely be ex

Ese mismo deseo de muerte se apoderó de la plana mayor del nazismo: cincuenta y tres generales del ejército, catorce de la fuerza aérea y once de la marina se suicidaron, además del ministro de Educación Bernhard Rust, el ministro de Justicia Otto Thierack, el mariscal de campo Walter Model, el Zorro del Desierto, Erwin Rommel, y, por supuesto, el

Barbarossa persuaded the Finns to avenge their 1940 defeat: in June 1941 Finland’s army, reequipped by Hitler, joined the assault on the Soviet Union. German troops thrust from northern Norway to reach positions within thirty miles of Murmansk.

In this testing environment, Major General Archibald Wavell, the soldier who lost an eye near Ypres and walked through the Jaffa Gate into Jerusalem with Lawrence in 1917, had been reviving Lawrence’s guerrilla tactics, using cunning, deception, mobility and tiny ‘mosquito columns’ against elephantine Italian forces. Wavell had been appointed Briti

Gubbins had been quick to see that Greece presented fertile territory for sabotage, with an underground resistance that had sprung into action within weeks of Mussolini’s invasion in the autumn of 1940. Peter Fleming had smuggled himself into Greece as soon as his work with the Kent Auxiliary Units was over: he managed to establish a small group of