MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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Why the Red Army stopped outside Warsaw
WILL PODMORE welcomes, with reservations, a new history of Operation Bagration and the Red Army’s defeat of Nazi Germany
BROTHERS IN ARMS: Soviet and Polish resistance Armia Krajowa (Home Army) soldiers patrol together along the Wielka/Large Street after the battle for Vilnius, as part of Operation Bagration, on July 17 1944
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War
Jonathan Dimbleby
Viking, £25
IN this history of 1944’s battles on the Eastern Front, author and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby draws on the diaries, letters and reminiscences of soldiers on both sides, from generals to foot soldiers. His account rightly emphasises the decisive role the Red Army played in winning the second world war.
As Dimbleby asserts, Operation Bagration, fought from June 22 to August 19, was “the greatest single battlefield victory of the second world war. In operational scale and strategic significance … [it] was of more moment even than Operation Overlord, the overlapping Allied campaign in Normandy that began with the cross-Channel invasion on 6 June 1944.”
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