My hunt for josef mengele

After covering the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, it was perhaps inevitable that Frank McDonough – one of the country’s foremost historians of the Third Reich – would turn his attention to the Holo

A round 3.30pm on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Minutes later, his still warm body was carried outside by loyal staffers and burned in the Reich Chancellery gardens. H

Julián Casanova Franco 528pp. Crítica. €22.90. Giles Tremlett El Generalísimo Franco: Power, violence and the quest for greatness 528pp. Bloomsbury. £30. Juan Carlos I, with Laurence Debray Reconcilia

John Blair Killing the Dead Vampire epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World 536pp. Princeton University Press. £30 (US $35). A dead body, as anyone who has sat with one will know, is an unsettling

In a prisoner-of-war camp in western Ukraine, a former miner from the east is being interviewed about how he ended up fighting for Russia. His speech is slurred and one arm paralysed: the results not

When James Watson died on 6th November last year at the age of 97, he was survived by a wife, two sons and a severely tarnished reputation. Watson was one of the world’s most famous scientists, having