Paul Laity

William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find. If you listen to the distant, crackly recording (which...

It takes a special man to resist Hilda von Einem. A German spy in John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), she is a ‘known man-eater’, who tries to inspire a rising of ‘Muslim hordes’ against the British Empire. ‘With her bright hair and the long exquisite oval of her face she looked like some destroying fury of a Norse legend.’ She also has a mesmeric...

On the evening of 26 April 1937, George Lowther Steer, a correspondent for the Times, was having dinner with other reporters at the Torrontegui Hotel in Bilbao. Sometime after nine, a distraught Basque official rushed into the dining-room: ‘Guernica is destroyed,’ he told them. The town was still burning when the journalists got there. Flames were licking at windows, the...

The organisers of the Festival of Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque...

With Yeoman Hague’s election pledge to ‘keep Britain independent’ and ‘give us back our country’ still echoing around the LRB office, a press release arrives on the Short Cuts desk from those brave crusaders against all things metric, the British Weights and Measures Association. There is apparently to be an appeal against the recent ruling that it is illegal to...