Weimar Years News Today

Historian Frank McDonough explains the period leading up to Hitler’s takeover of Germany in The Weimar Years. The insights provided into the success of extremist rhetoric are a timely warning for our times.

TONY RENNELL reviews the years most compelling history books, including Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn And The Marriage that Shook Europe and Rory Carrolls Killing Thatcher.

Novelists and nonfiction writers reveal the books they will be giving as gifts – and the paperback they would love to find in their own stocking

A slate of superb 20th-century histories were matched by a couple of magnificent, long-anticipated conclusions to medieval series

Andrew Motion Something old made new: The Iliad in Emily Wilson’s muscular and moving new translation, the first by a woman, is truly what it claims to be – a version for our time (Norton, £30). And something new made immediate: Hannah Sullivan’s second collection of poems, Was It For This (Faber, £12.99), ambitiously extends

‘Thirteen wasted years’ bellowed Adolf Hitler at receptive audiences in the spring of 1932. He was talking about the first full German democracy, the Weimar Republic. Proclaimed in November 1918, it was born out of a desire to do things better after the horrors of the first world war and was an ambitious attempt to

Not ordinarily a barrel of laughs, Lenin made a rare joke in trying to pin down the national character of the Germans. They would never mount a successful revol