Donald trump

The coming week will see the last major commemoration of a second world war anniversary – 80 years since VE-Day – which a handful of surviving veterans will attend. It is unjust that VJ-Day in August will attract much less attention, but so did the Far East campaigns, much to the contemporary chagrin of the ‘Forgotten Army’ in Burma. One of Bill Slim’s soldiers was George MacDonald Fraser, whom I knew and adored, as did millions of fans of his Flashman books. In his fine memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, George described how one May day in 1945, as his company lined out to attack a Japanese-held village, a green

Congratulations to Donald Trump. It is almost solely thanks to his exertions that Mark Carney, the incarnation of Davos man, is now victorious in Canada’s general election. The Euro fanatic now wins on a ‘sovereignty’ ticket. If Trump had not intervened to lay claim to Canada, almost as if America were Russia and Canada were Ukraine, it would have gone Conservative. The President may be only hazily aware that the King, of whom, he says, he has the ‘honour to be a friend’, is also King of Canada. If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person, Trump may come

Eighty years ago, as Red Army shells rained down over Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery garden, a group of his remaining friends and colleagues huddled under the block-shaped exit of his last grim command centre, the Führerbunker. Flames engulfed the bodies of the newlywed Mr and Mrs Hitler, casting a flickering light over the onlookers, who raised their arms in a final straight-armed salute. The enduring cultural and political relevance of Hitler’s death hardly needs restating. It gave us online parodies of the rant scene in the film Downfall and, of course, a wild range of conspiracy theories. I once hoped that my book Hitler’s Death: the Case Against Conspiracy might