I have often heard Daniel Finkelstein on the BBC talking wisely and wittily about current political events.
I knew a little of his Jewish background, but I had never expected such a harrowing and remarkable story of wartime persecution. Long before his parents met, his relatives moved around Europe, picking crops in Russia or anticipating the worst on the way to concentration camps.
It is unbelievable to think that other human beings could be so inhuman. Could it happen again? “It isn’t about to happen to my children,” writes Finkelstein, “But could it? It could. Absolutely, it could.”
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From longstanding political columnist and commentator Daniel Finkelstein, a powerful memoir exploring both his mother and his father's devastating experiences of persecution, resistance and survival during the Second World War.
Daniel's mother Mirjam Wiener was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarete Wiener. Alfred, a decorated hero from the Great War, is now widely acknowledged to have been the first person to recognise the existential danger Hitler posed to the Jews and began,…
While everybody was going berserk for the Beatles, France went its own way and this is a frank memoir by the sultry singer, best known for Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles.
She details her dysfunctional marriage to the actor/singer, Jacques Dutronc. When he has affairs, she says, “We should rejoice when someone else gives the man in your life what you are no longer able to give him.”
Plenty of information the decadent Serge Gainsbourg; everytime he enters the narrative; you know something bizarre is going to happen. The title isn’t explained until the final page.
“I was for a very long time passionately in love with her, as I’m sure she’s guessed. Every male in the world, and a number of females also were, and we all still are.” ―David Bowie
“Françoise was the ultimate pin-up of most hip bedroom walls, and I know for a fact that Brian Jones and Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and many other pop stars were desperately interested in having Françoise Hardy become their girlfriend in some way.” ―Malcolm McLaren
Françoise Hardy is best known in Europe for originating the famed “Yé-Yé” sound in pop music which began…
A tense, incident-packed, brilliantly researched account of the making of the epic 1963 film, Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It received mammoth publicity for all the wrong reasons, mainly because of their lavish affair, Burton’s drinking, and Taylor’s illnesses.
Cleopatra was seen as more about them than the Queen of the Nile. Some great stories about the rest of the cast too (notably Rex Harrison) and you can tell that Patrick Humphries loves telling these tales. I even want to see the film again and I never thought I’d write those words!
There had been stars before. There had been films prior to Cleopatra. But in all the cynical, greedy, magical, histrionic history of the movies, there had never been a combination like that of Elizabeth Taylor and Cleopatra.
Other films may have taken more money, won more awards or attracted better reviews, but none have come close to the legend that is Cleopatra.
What began in 1958 as a remake of the 1917 Theda Bara film, which starred Joan Collins and was projected to cost $2 million, would open five years later, having cost nearly twenty times as much. The budget…
