WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Towering tribute to the hero city
The novel Stalingrad is a magnificent account of the people who endured the battle which changed the course of WWII, says GORDON PARSONS
Bearing witness: Vasily Grossman in Stalingrad
[Waralbum.ru] 
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
Stalingrad
by Vasily Grossman
(Harvill Secker, £25)
THESE days, superlatives can be overused, resulting in truly great achievements being devalued.
Yet no-one can doubt that Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate deserves the highest accolade. So too with its prequel Stalingrad, now published for the first time in English.
There is evidence to suggest that this great Soviet writer intended the two works to be one monumental statement of humanity’s suffering and surviving the cataclysm of the second world war.
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