RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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Distressing reminder of the Lidice massacre
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
ON JUNE 10, 1942 nazi police units murdered 173 adult men and 52 women in the hamlet of Lidice.
It was a barbaric reprisal for the execution by British-trained Czech commandos of Reinhard Heydrich, SS supremo for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
The choice of victims wasn’t random. The Gestapo mistakenly believed that there was a connection between one of Heydrich’s executioners and a family in Lidice whose son was serving in the Czechoslovak army in Britain.
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