MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Why the Red Army stopped outside Warsaw
WILL PODMORE welcomes, with reservations, a new history of Operation Bagration and the Red Army’s defeat of Nazi Germany
BROTHERS IN ARMS: Soviet and Polish resistance Armia Krajowa (Home Army) soldiers patrol together along the Wielka/Large Street after the battle for Vilnius, as part of Operation Bagration, on July 17 1944
[Polish National Archive/CC]
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War
Jonathan Dimbleby
Viking, £25
IN this history of 1944’s battles on the Eastern Front, author and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby draws on the diaries, letters and reminiscences of soldiers on both sides, from generals to foot soldiers. His account rightly emphasises the decisive role the Red Army played in winning the second world war.
As Dimbleby asserts, Operation Bagration, fought from June 22 to August 19, was “the greatest single battlefield victory of the second world war. In operational scale and strategic significance … [it] was of more moment even than Operation Overlord, the overlapping Allied campaign in Normandy that began with the cross-Channel invasion on 6 June 1944.”
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