“Rarely has so much talent been so well concealed” Sir John Major on Sir Martin Gilbert 14 November 2017  When Esther Gilbert invited me to deliver this inaugural Lecture in Martin’s name, I was honoured to be asked, and delighted to accept. Many – perhaps most – of you present will have…

It was a cold and snowy December night. I was on my way from London UK to London Canada, stranded at the airport in Toronto. My flight to London had been cancelled due to the weather, and the last flight of the night was full. I dragged myself to the…

  The Sir Martin Gilbert Inaugural Memorial Lecture  On November 14, Sir John Major, former British Prime Minister, will be opening the Centre and launching the charity drive that will fund it.  Sir John will be delivering the first Sir Martin Gilbert  Memorial Lecture to what is already a sold-out…

In 2008, Carlton Publishers commissioned Sir Martin’s book The Story of Israel which tells the story of the dream of a Jewish National Home in British-Mandate Palestine through to the present day. The book is “different” in that it tells the story through removable facsimile documents along with Sir Martin’s…

In 2009, Martin and I were privileged to be part of a film crew that traversed Europe by train visiting places where Righteous Diplomats had issued visas and had helped Jews escape before and in some cases during the war. Along with us were former refugees who had been saved,…

Picture: Pen and ink drawing by former prisoner Mieczyslaw Koscielniak of the Auschwitz Musicians On September 12, in honour of the pre-launch of the Sir Martin Gilbert Learning Centre, Leo Geyer and Constella presented a short excerpt from their up-coming full-length Opera-Ballet. Based on the music manuscripts found in the…

Sigmund Sobolewski at Auschwitz, June 1990. Photo ©Byron Christopher In Memoriam Sigmund Sobolewski, 11 May 1923 – 7 August 2017 On 14 June 1940 Sigmund Sobolewski was on the first transport taken to Auschwitz. He volunteered to go instead of his father, a Polish Catholic anti-Nazi, who had been ill.…

Statesman, Biographer, Actor It was Robert Hardy, the great English actor who best portrayed Winston Churchill on the screen. Some actors capture the infamous scowl, the unlit cigar, the half-empty glass, but it was Robert Hardy who seemed to have got the man – as those who knew Churchill attest.…

Sir Martin writes: “One of the craft that brought men back from Dunkirk on June 1 was the yacht Sundowner, owned and piloted by a retired Naval Commander, C. H. Lightoller, the senior surviving officer of the Titanic, whose younger son had been one of the first pilots to be…

Photo: Dieppe raid, The battle 19th August 1942 As the thousands of Warsaw’s Jews were being deported to their deaths in Treblinka in the summer of 1942, 1700 kilometers to the West, the Allies were desperate to establish a toe-hold in Europe and take pressure off German-occupied Russia on the…

Photo: Refuseniks meet with British historian and Soviet Jewry advocate Martin Gilbert in Moscow in 1985. From left: Oksana Kholmyansky, Yuli Kosharovsky, Alexander Ioffe, Martin Gilbert. Front row: Mikhail Kholmyansky. Collection of Mikhail Kholmyansky. This July sees the long-awaited publication of Yuli Kosharovsky’s book We Are Jews Again, Jewish Activism in…

Photo: Sir Martin taking notes of names and inscriptions on the wooden crosses of the German soldiers buried there; note Jewish gravestone among the crosses. Fricourt German Cemetery, the Somme In November 2004 Martin and I spent a few days on the Somme battlefield in France. He was doing the…

On 3 January 2012, Martin and I spent the day in Ramallah, a guest of the Portland Trust, of which Martin was a Trustee. The Portland Trust, with offices in London, Tel Aviv and Ramallah, works to promote peace and stability between Israelis and Palestinians, by economic development. Although we…

After Martin and I married, he took me to India to meet (and hopefully be approved by) his “adopted aunt” Fori Nehru, the wife of the Indian diplomat BK Nehru, cousin of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister.  As Martin describes in his book Letters to Auntie Fori, the Story…

Thank you to David Aaronovitch, who in his 13 April 2017 piece in The Times, “Don’t let the revisionists rewrite Nazi history”, describes “intellectual evisceration” as carried out by Sir Martin in 1987.  That discussion, in 1987, was about the suggestion of collaboration between “Zionist leaders” and the Germans to…

See video below In February I was invited to Hillsdale College in Michigan where work on the Official Churchill Biography is continuing. Upon Randolph Churchill’s death in 1968, Sir Martin was asked to finish the biography of his father that Randolph had begun. Randolph, with his team of researchers –…

Thank You to Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, the Metropolitan Police and the National Security Services, the NHS National Health Service, Members of the Houses of Parliament, Leaders of Britain’s religious communities, and the thousands who gathered, for standing together to combat hatred and terror.  Prayers and healing to those…

THE CHURCHILL DOCUMENTS: Volume 19 Fateful Questions, September 1943 to April 1944 Hillsdale College Press has published the latest instalment in the Official Biography of Sir Winston Churchill. Fateful Questions tells Churchill’s story during the final four months of 1943 and the first months of 1944 over a total 2728 pages of documents.…

In February, while visiting Hillsdale College in Michigan, I had the opportunity to visit the Detroit Holocaust Memorial Center – an informative and beautifully designed museum of Jewish life, Pre-war Antisemitism, and the history of the Holocaust, an exhibit which finishes with a display of Jewish soldiers from Michigan who…