Michael Baker

One of the more singular aspects of what I would call loosely the standard or traditional British narrative of the First World War has been its sombre focus on casualty rates and, more particularly, on those killed or missing in action - the war dead.  Any visitor to the Western Front today cannot fail to note the acres of beautifully laid out tombstones, in graveyards big and small, devoted to the hundreds of thousands of British military personnel who gave their lives in the Great War. You...

A final word about the Ukraine War - and then I'll shut up and switch (for a while) to something else in future posts. It 's hard to see how this bitter conflict will end given the present stalemate on the battlefield and the unwillingness of both sides to compromise on their most cherished aims - albeit Moscow, the aggressor, is still demanding Ukrainian territory which it looks increasingly unlikely to conquer (if it could ever have done). If we look at the two world wars of the 20th...

Today marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. What's memorialised here is what we have become used to calling 'The Holocaust', by which is meant the deliberate extermination of some six million European Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. But this very particular term (with its emphatic 'The' prefix and capital H) has only really been around since the 1970s and '80s, which was when it first entered public discourse, having been until then largely the...