No excuses can hide the criminal actions of a Nazi fellow-traveller in this admirably objective documentary, suggests MARTIN HALL
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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
PAUL DONOVAN relishes a fascinating exploration of the leading lights of the Labour right in the 1970s
BEN LUNN alerts us to the creeping return of philanthropy and private patronage, and suggests alternative paths to explore
A novel by Argentinian Jorge Consiglio, a personal dictionary by Uruguayan Ida Vitale, and poetry by Mexican Homero Aridjis
MIK SABIERS savours the first headline solo show of the stalwart of Brighton’s indie-punk outfit Blood Red Shoes
New releases reviewed by IAN SINCLAIR
STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
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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