Richard Overy

A City Up In Arms

Rising '44: 'The Battle For Warsaw'

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(Macmillan 752pp £25) order from our bookshop

A FEW WEEKS ago I made my first visit to Warsaw. It looks much like any other Central European city: an inner town of old squares, palaces and cobbled marketplaces , and an outer ring of modern high-rise blocks and advertising hoardings, with the Palace of Culture, the one obtrusive piece of Stalin Gothic to remind visitors that Warsaw was a ‘people’s democracy’ in the Soviet bloc for forty-five years after the end of the Second World War.

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