If the Yalta conference features at all in our collective consciousness it is as the photograph of the Allied leaders taken by Robert Hopkins, son of Harry Hopkins.
“At about three in the morning of Thursday 3 May, a police constable was on routine night patrol in West London. His beat took him through the small triangle of South Kensington that lies like a wedge between Hyde Park and Knightsbridge.
“There is a surplus of books about modern Greece, but this one is the best for many years”, writes a reviewer in the New Statesman in the latter half of the last century.
It’s a few years since I read a classic detective story; one in this case written in the 1920s with all the tropes of the best inter-war detective fiction.
For thirteen days in 1962 President Kennedy chaired a committee convened to decide what the United States should do about Russia’s (secret) deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Why read a book (more than 500 pages) when you know how it ends? This occurred to me as I started Abyss, The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 by (Sir) Max Hastings.