WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Let Us Beat our Swords into Ploughshares, UN Headquarters, New York
[Evan Schneider/Creative Commons] 
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
WHEN delegates from 50 nations signed the newly created UN Charter in April 1945 in San Francisco, its explicit mission was to keep “succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
The ceremony took place in late June and was immediately torpedoed — as it would be on many an occasion in the future — by cynical US doublespeak. On August 6 and 9 Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated.
The UN general assembly met for the first time in London in January 1946 and 13 years years later in December 1959, at the height of the cold war, the government of the Soviet Union presented the UN with a bronze sculpture, Let Us Beat Our Swords into Ploughshares, by Soviet artist Evgeny Vuchetich, creator of the Stalingrad memorial.
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