MARIA DUARTE and MICHAL BONCZA review Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day, Familiar Touch, Nino, and Toy Story 5
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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]
MATTHEW HAWKINS explores the initiatives proposed by HEALING ARTS SCOTLAND
ALEX HALL welcomes an analysis of how modern capitalism is deeply intertwined with emotions, and their manipulation
MARTIN GRAHAM welcomes a statistical analysis of how much tax the super-rich pay, and foresees that the demand will flush out their agents
RICHARD WORTH relishes the fleeting moment and sense of flow of the late, great saxophonist
DENNIS BROE notes the thin, unfunny and apolitical quality of the gruel dished up by the US networks and studios for mass consumption
BARBARA BOSWELL remembers South African poet, storyteller, publisher, editor and activist Diana Ferrus (1953-2026)
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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