I’ve started this book a couple of times I think, but this time it stuck - I’m mildly obsessed with Bletchley Park, the secrecy, the combination of using maths and language to make SUCH a difference to the world, the outrageous abuse of Alan Turing. This book tells the history of the park from pre-war, through great achievements and then the astounding secrecy that remained even after the war was done. We get to hear the story told from people who were there, and documents and facts that are now in the public domain, and it’s well done mixing a historical timeline alongside chapters on what life was like in the park. It felt a little drawn out in places but ultimatley is a great record of an incredible achievement.

It’s such a well known story but this must have been one of the first adaptations of it. Obviously, it’s a tragedy, and it’s told very well in this film - although it’s a little drawn out and long, three hours! The actors inhabit their real life characters very well, although Anne is a bit high pitched, she definitely gets the restless quality. The steadiness of Otto and the irritability of everyone else. The tensions ramp up, the stakes get higher, you feel it growing all the time. There were a few liberties taken in the service of the film but ultimately it’s very respectfully done.

Probably not one of the best war films I’ve seen, but I do like all the train action (minus the incessant screeching of the whistle). It probably doesn’t get off to a good start for me because I’m not a big fan of paintings, so the whole endeavour seems a little bit pointless to me. So much anger, death and destruction for a bit of paint on canvas. But I get the concept - stop the Nazis being greedy, etc - and that makes it a bit of an adventure worth a watch if there’s nothing else on.

I don’t mind it when a writer diverts from the normal expectation of their writings, and this one is quite a change of pace from the thriller writer. Rather than agents and detectives saving the world, we’re following three very different characters as they navigate the terrifying and tragic world of WWII London. It’s quite slow paced, and I feel like it could have been a lot shorter, but the underlying story is interesting and these are three characters I’d really like to have spent more time with.

I’ve seen this before, a long time ago, and I remember liking it. It’s in the same category as The Great Escape - a huge war adventure with super famous names doing very heroic things. This one involves climbing up a big mountain, escaping the Germans a couple of times, plotting and double crossing, and eventually big explosions. Hooray! It’s great, the cast are brilliant, particularly David Niven who always shines in roles like this. The only downside is sometimes the escapes from the various scrapes felt a little bit too easy… although always happy for the plot to keep rolling on. It’s a long film so we didn’t need it to be any longer! Good twists and turns, and a satisfying ending. Top work.

This is a weird one, there’s nothing outwardly wrong with this movie, it’s typical of it’s time - singing and dancing and finding love along the way. But it’s also really, really bad. There aren’t many songs, although the dancing is top notch, so it feels a stretch to call it a musical really. The story is awful - this guy stalking a woman he just met and really getting under her skin. Even if you count for the fact that it’s ‘of it’s time’, it’s still pretty questionable. And ultimately the story is a whole lot of nothing. There are better Astaire movies out there.

An intriguing low-key war film, this one, featuring the true story of an escape from a prisoner-of-war camp via the means of a gymnastics vaulting horse. The first two thirds of the film are quiet plotting, planning and tunnel digging, as you marvel at the stubborn patience of these officers who have a sworn duty to try and escape however possible. It’s not quite at the same enticing level as Great Escape but it’s a similar sort of style. Then once beyond the confines of the fences, our intrepid officers have to try and find their way to neutral ground - not at all easy, even more difficult than tunnelling out in the first place. Just an interesting film telling another of those important and surprising stories. It ends a little bit abruptly, but I suppose whatever happens next probably becomes a whole other story in its own right.

I was keen to read this after absolutely loving the TV series (and it’s follow up series’ as well), and quite enjoyed reading the source material that sparked such an intense and well produced show. It’s hard to tell if I would have enjoyed the book so much if I didn’t have the characters already in my mind, and sometimes I wondered if the TV show had done a better job at bringing to life the horror of those days. But ultimately it doesn’t matter because I had seen it already, I did have the characters in my mind, and I did enjoy reading… if enjoy is the right word for a book covering such events!

Accidentally coinciding with the D-Day commemorations in June and going on for several weeks after, I managed to time a viewing of the trilogy of Band of Brothers shows - the original Band of Brothers, which was my second run through; the Pacific, which was the weakest of the three; and then Apple TV+’s latest offering Masters of the Air.

With the 80th annivery of D-Day this past week, there’s been a lot of remembrance and commemoration of the Second World War, so I dug this diary out of my to-read list and whizzed through it. Books like this are always fascinating, to read about the daily life of those just trying to get through the war - not on the front line, or necessarily in the thick of it, but still struggling day by day. The structure of the book was good with each month given context of the wider war picture, but some of the formatting went a bit wonky, and there were some significant gaps in the entries. But what was there was good.

I’ve watched quite a few TV shows recently that I wanted to give a mention of but couldn’t summon up the thoughts for a full blog post - so it seemed sensible to do a roundup of them all in one go.

I binge watched the recent TV adaptation of this story, and it was fascinating, and I realised I owned the book already so quickly read through the source material as well. It’s good, obviously completely distressing from the moment Lali is torn from his family, but it’s an interesting story and amazing that they managed to find each other again. You have to read this with the right perspective - it’s a story told by an author who picked at the memories of one person who lived through it. Many other stories to be told out there, and other sides to other stories. But hard to argue with how eye-opening this is.

This was a really easy read, following the story of an unhappily married woman and how she ends up being something of a spy in her high class world. On top of that, a murder is committed and all the layers have to be unravelled to come to something of a happy ending. I whipped through this quickly, although I felt like some of the periphary characters could have been fleshed out more, and I wasn’t 100% sure that the way the staff were treated was realistic, but it was a quick and fun read.

I always sort of remember this movie as ’the other long one that’s not as good as Titanic’ but actually rewatching it after a long while, it was better than I remembered it. It is too long, really, it doesn’t need to be that drawn out, and you can easily see why it’s called one of the most inaccurate military history movies ever. And I’m not convinced of the chemistry between any of the three leads, really.

I’ve just wrapped up watching A Small Light, the series that chronicles the life of Miep Gies, the secretary and incredibly brave woman that helped hide Anne Frank and family during the Second World War. The series is incredible, beautifully made and well told, but also difficult to watch - eight episodes that chronicle the build up to the war, the hideous slide into occupation and oppression, and the terrible aftermath.

I like Adam Rutherford’s style, he’s good at describing complicated scientific concepts well and that’s useful for this book which takes on the huge topic of eugenics. The book is in two halves, the first describing the history of eugenics and the different forms it has taken, and the second looking at the global impacts and where we are today, and where we might be going.

This is such a good read. It’s gentle and methodical whilst being full of tension and worry. It follows the exploits of a handful of characters, mostly women, as they do their bit for the war effort in the UK and in Denmark - field agents, codebreakers and those trying to improve the situation for those on the ground and those risking their lives every day. Whilst it doesn’t show the full horrific action-packed impact of war like other fiction does, it shows the real heart of what war does: tearing families apart, making everyone suspicious of everyone and ultimately having innocent people die for no good reason. Beautifully written and achingly sad, but worth every moment.

I feel like I must have read this as a kid, it has that sort of friendly familiarity you get from books of your childhood. But I really couldn’t remember any of it - that it starts in the current time, all that happens as Carrie remembers her past, being evacuated to the countryside and getting caught up in the middle of a family row, and the devastating end that has traumatised her for so long. There’s ultimately a nice ending though and it’s all so realistic and well drawn that you can’t help feeling as if you’re there.

The film suffers from the same problems as the book - the tone is odd, the sympathies feel misplaced, it’s a very simplistic and historically inaccurate view of the Holocaust. But the film itself is ok - Asa is incredible as the wide-eyed innocent, and that twist ending continues to pack a punch.

I watched this film a while back and knowing the book was written by C. S. Forester of most excellent Hornblower fame, I have had this on my to read pile for too long. It’s so good. Just like the film, I was caught up in the tension of the piece, and even though I didn’t understand all of the intricate, well-researched details, you can’t help but be swept up in the misery and cold, the state of high alert, the danger. It’s so well done, and although there’s not a lot of room for character development, it’s still a really good story.

This was a free audiobook included in the Audible Plus catalogue, and I just picked it at random when I wanted something to listen to. I was only intending to use it as background noise but then I sort of got hooked on the story. The characters are never really fleshed out to a huge degree, but you care enough to follow them through their wartime struggle - with our hero Lily training to be a radio operator, dreaming of being a pilot, but dealing with a burgeoning love life along the way. It was actually a pretty entertaining listen.

This is the eye-witness account of being inside Auschwitz from Eva Mozes Kor, one of the many sets of twins that were allowed to live in the camp so that medical experiments aka human atrocities could be undertaken on them without concent. The story is enlightening, another horror story of how awful human beings can be to each other, but it also has that generosity of spirit that many survivors seem to share. The afterwords were interesting, adding context to some of the controversies Kor has been the centre of, but ultimately, it’s her story and it’s an important one.

I read through this book in almost no time it all, it’s an absolutely capitvating read from a survivor of Auschwitz with an incredible outlook and zest for life that can only be admired. Eddie tells his story simply, with that ongoing confusion over why such atrocities happened, how people could turn on each other so badly. There are no answers, of course, but Eddie seems to have found peace and tells us, who can never imagine what it was like to live through such things, how to find it also. A lovely, if harrowing, book.

This is a controversial book and film, with much made of the lack of historical accuracy and concerns that it might lead children to think wrongly about the Holocaust. All of that may be true, but I have to admit, as a fable (which it is labelled as), it’s very good - tragic and brutal, the twist at the end makes me want to scream, it’s so awful. I don’t believe Bruno could have been quite so ignorant as he was, particularly not being able to learn the name or purpose of the place despite living there for a year, but the high level twists and turns do pack a punch.

This is one of those short but hardhitting memoirs, that really hits home hard due to the simplicity of the narrative. It’s an incredible read, giving insight into time spent in concentration camps during World War II, and it’s just a reminder of how horrific everything was. Weisel writes with facts and emotion but somehow manages to contain the rage and emotion that it strikes in the reader. A tough but important one.

Having watched the film on Netflix, I was interested in how the book would stack up. It’s very similar, just a few tweaks in the film to give it that extra edge. But I loved the book, it’s equisitely written, super simple, laying out the facts, following these few characters as they go about their business and change our understanding of history. It’s just wonderful, I was always disappointed when I had to put it down.

This was a pretty good film overall, very blockbuster-ish, tense and moving but actually quite gentle considering some of the more brutal war films that have been released since. I spent the first half of the film being agog at how many famous names and faces were in the cast, and then the second half thinking - we can’t have gone through all this and then find they don’t make it back, can we? But having just watched The Perfect Storm, I wasn’t convinced! Thankfully it was an okay ending, which made for a perfectly enjoyable watch.

A lovely memoir. I picked this up after watching Tony Robinson interview the author on his Walking Through History programme. It’s not an area I know a lot about, Guernsey, and it was fascinating and terrifying to think about the occupation by the Germans during the Second World War. This is the story through the eyes of a child, and it’s interesting to hear about the ways the kids tried to get extra food, the things that weren’t allowed (radios), and the way everyone tended to look out for each other. When the Red Cross ships arrived, I could feel the relief pouring from the page. Lovely.

Exquisite film, this one. Slow-paced, softly-spoken, not hard-hitting action but gentle drama which somehow manages to heighten the emotions of what could be a boring story (man digs a hole) but actually manages to be an enlightening piece about history and what it means to all of us.

This is a great little collection of war effort leaflets relating to food, rationing, exercise and generally trying to be healthy. It was eye-opening, because you sort of think of the war and rationing as a time of being hungry and unhealthy, but actually, whilst there may have been a shortness of certain foods, everything else looked super healthy. It made me quite sad to see how we have completely lost the basic building blocks of nutrition. This needs to be hammered into kids from an early age, by parents, schools, shops, governments, whoever. Make it easy and second nature.

Loved it. I actually only had a vague idea going into this what it was about - a Tom Hanks project, about the war. I didn’t realise it was written by him too, which is actually an impressive feat considering how much naval jargon is in there. It was so good. A great little story, told well, in a short space of time.

This is an odd film. It has that classic older movie problem of being far too slow to get going. Seriously, I don’t mind a bit of build up but it’s 45 minutes before they even decide to do the god-damn heist. And it’s not even that the length of time is a problem in itself, it’s that you don’t learn anything about any of the characters in that time. There’s such a lot of them, that there’s barely time to get to know any, and in the end the only ones you could care about were Big Joe and Oddball.

Based on nothing but my faith in Roland Emmerich, I purchased this film and was quite looking forward to it. What a let down! It made no sense, bombing sequence after bombing sequence, flitting here and there, and not really making any progress with the plot. They were explaining things but I couldn’t follow it.

The opening sequence on the beach is harrowing, mind-blowing, intense, a sensory overload that really brings to life the horrors of war in a way that no other film has managed to do so. (For me, so far.) Once that’s through, there’s still two hours of horror, war, tension, needless death, moral questions but also camaraderie, bravery, dark humour, and really some astonishing scenes.

Another Ken Follett classic, I really enjoyed this one. Telling the tale of the one final flight of the Boeing Clipper, crossing the Atlantic from Southampton to New York in various stages and getting more and more dramatic as each stint unfolds.

It’s an interesting work really, because it starts out from the point of view of the antagonist, and it’s quite a long time before you really see that he’s a bad guy rather than someone just working for the country they are loyal to. He doesn’t seem all that different to someone like James Bond, so it is almost hard to totally root against him - until he starts acting badly, that is.

This is the tale of a little known escape attempt from a German Prisoner of War camp in the midst of the Second World War. A large scale attempt to get out was attempted after the prisoners realised their tunnelling exploits were not getting them anywhere.

The second book of an epic Follett trilogy, Winter of the World encompasses the build up and events of World War Two plus the horrifying end and aftermath of the fighting. I feel like this book didn’t quite have the same impact as the first, but that was mostly down to how much ground it had to cover.

I liked the first half of this, whereby a prisoner of war spends his days watching the birdlife just outside the camp rather than dealing with the atrocities of life inside with the Nazis. It was interesting to see the relationship develop between him and the Kommandant.

The story of a journalist working in Berlin in the fraught moments before world war breaks out for the second time, Zoo Station is captivating. Although much of it is logistical - travelling here, meeting this person, setting up arrangements - it’s never boring. There’s a tension throughout that keeps you second guessing and eager to know more. And there’s a sort of depressing foreboding to the piece, watching horrific events unfold without being able to stop them, knowing something terrible is about to happen at any moment.

I didn’t know much about this one before watching, only that it appeared to have a great cast and told a real-life story. It’s always hard watching the sufferings that went on at the hands of the Nazis, and although it’s easy to say this is just about ‘art’, it has a much more important message than that.

This is the brief story of an English RAF pilot who is taken prisoner on a remote South Pacific island by the Japanese. He’s lucky enough to have a friendly captor, and makes something of a life for himself on the island, following the final moments of the second world war from the point of view of the Japanese.

In the spirit of completing at least a couple of paragraphs, I’ll expand. Benedict did a great job with a complex character, and along with the smart script managed to make a really difficult and ultimately unlikeable personality sympathetic and even warm. Keira found her perfect accent at last, the ideal role for her. The scenes when she visited at the end were really hard to bear.

Was quite looking forward to this one, but now having seen it, I’m not convinced it was worth the wait. Brad Pitt was good, but I couldn’t sympathise with the character all that much - he didn’t seem a particularly nice guy, and granted you have to have a certain attitude to be able to withstand the horrors that these people went through, but it felt above and beyond that.

A difficult read, this one. The story follows Sage, a reclusive baker who has family issues to deal with. Aside from her own problems, she’s also faced with learning the horrific history of an elderly friend who claims to be a Nazi officer that presided over Auschwitz. The way the story weaves around, through different points of view and alongside a fiction inside the fiction, is great and it gradually builds up the horror and the history of the Holocaust.

I love it for the disparate characters coming together for the common goal. The way the Scrounger can get what he needs, and how they manage to find wood from every little place. The way they cover up their activities, the way they have highs and lows, and sometimes the lows are just too much.

There’s nothing better than a good spy thriller and this was a great one. I was vaguely aware it was a film but hadn’t realised the book and the screenplay were written at the same time. You can visualise almost every scene, with great descriptions throughout - particularly of how cold it all is!

This is a pretty tough read - from the start our protagonist is in prison, being tortured and abused. He goes to prison, escapes from prison and starts the titular walk, across deserts and mountains and the most inhospitable land you can imagine.

The stellar cast in this one makes it a must watch, but the story seemed like an intriguing one, and hey, George Clooney takes a turn behind the camera as well. Plus, Matt Damon! So, with those things going for it, it’s a shame that it didn’t quite deliver. It feels very sterilised, very clean. War is terrible and horrific and dirty, but here everything seemed quite chipper. The quick team-bonding at the beginning took place in top notch barracks, even the blown up buildings looked like they weren’t allowed to have any brick dust out of place. Maybe it was a style choice?

It did feel a bit short, not that anything was missing, but just that there’s scope for the characters and the story to be developed into a full-length novel. However, I equally appreciate the novella for not taking up too much of my time, and for giving me an interesting read with something to think about after putting it down.