[[Category:History|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|History]] __NOTOC__ <!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Roger Moorhouse
|title=The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941
|rating=3.5
|genre=History
|summary=Before WWII started, you didn't really have peace. Tensions had hardly settled down since the Great War, and there had been conflicts several times since, particularly in what would become the Theatre of War in eastern Europe. Nazi Germany and the Soviet regime were already at loggerheads, with the former supporting Japanese aggression in eastern Asia. They were bedfellows in evil, but very much on opposing sides. But with things stirring like never before under Hitler's expansionist activities, and despite numerous instances of this side talking to that potential enemy about the other, Nazi and Communist seemed to be firm foes. Both had publicly been denouncing the other – the Soviets deeming Nazis one side of the same corrupt, capitalist coin as us Brits, the Hitlerites already equating Communism with Jewry. But from under that period when the sides were ''pouring buckets of shit on each other's heads'' (sorry for the language, but it’s me quoting Stalin, believe it or not) came an extraordinary Pact – one of a handful in fact, that deemed Germany and Russia non-aggressors and collaborators, - just in time for them to share Poland between themselves. The initial document was short, but had an impact to affect 50 million people then, and many millions now – and yet it's hardly been the subject of a full look before now.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099571897</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Hugh Bicheno
|summary=What does a rainbow mean to you? How would you explain the creation of the world if you had no science as such, or the changing of the seasons? What other kinds of natures – chaotic trickery, evil personae or even the characteristics of goats – people your world? And why is it that the answers man and woman have collectively formed to such questions have been so similar across the oceans and across the centuries? This highly pictorial volume looks at the mythologies that formed those answers, and locks on to a multitude of subjects – blood, music, godly activity – to show us what has followed.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0500291519</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Caroline Moorehead
|title=Village of Secrets
|rating=3.5
|genre=History
|summary=''Village of Secrets'' is an account of resistance (with a small 'r') and rescue in a series of small villages scattered across the Vivarais-Lignon plateau in Vichy France. Residents of these villages harboured a number of people, many of them children, many of them Jews, seeking to avoid deportation to concentration camps, at great personal risk. There have been other accounts of this chapter in French history and, of course, a great many books about Vichy France in general. However, ''Village of Secrets'' is, perhaps, the most detailed, much of it based on primary sources (interviews with both rescuers and the rescued, or their families), backed up by extensive documentary research.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009955464X</amazonuk>
}}