Simon Heffer
Swept Under The Carpet
Bad Faith: The Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland
By Carmen Callil
Jonathan Cape 576pp £20
The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation
By Richard Vinen
Allen Lane The Penguin Press 496pp £25
The scars inflicted on France by the Nazi occupation of 1940–44 – and, more to the point, by the collaboration of some of the French with the occupier – still run deep. For decades after the event ‘collabos’ were shunned in French communities. Now most of them are dead, but in some cases their children have been tarred with the brush of betrayal.
Attitudes, though, have never been black and white. After the purges of 1944–45, whose climax was the execution of the Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval and the sentencing to death (commuted to life imprisonment) of the 89-year-old Marshal Pétain, French society seemed to draw a veil over what, to put
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It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted and published is a story of subterfuge and duplicity.
Kate Loveman tells the tale.
Kate Loveman - Publishing Pepys
Kate Loveman: Publishing Pepys
literaryreview.co.uk
Arthur Christopher Benson was a pillar of the Edwardian establishment. He was supremely well connected. As his newly published diaries reveal, he was also riotously indiscreet.
Piers Brendon compares Benson’s journals to others from the 20th century.
Piers Brendon - Land of Dopes & Tories
Piers Brendon: Land of Dopes & Tories - The Benson Diaries: Selections from the Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson by Eamon Duffy & Ronald Hyam (edd)
literaryreview.co.uk
Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who has commanded most attention from collectors and connoisseurs.
Was he really the finer artist, asks Tanya Harrod, or is it time Gwen emerged from her brother’s shadow?
Tanya Harrod - Cut from the Same Canvas
Tanya Harrod: Cut from the Same Canvas - Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
literaryreview.co.uk