Yitzhak Rabin and John Major during a reception ceremony in Jerusalem’s Rose Garden Credit: National Photo Collection; Photo by Sa’ar Ya’acov, 12/03/1995 By Martin Gilbert It was my good fortune to have met Yitzhak Rabin a number of times during the last twenty years of his cruelly truncated life. Our…
You may have noticed … different spellings for Hanukah. Gloria Donen Sosin, an American correspondent of mine, has just sent me an article in which she notes no less than eighteen different spellings – in English transliteration alone – of the five Hebrew letters that make up the name of…
In 2006, when Martin’s book Kristallnacht came out, he was invited to a party to celebrate the book and to launch it on its way. The party was held at the Residence of the German Ambassador in London, and our host was the German Chargé d’Affaires, Hans-Henning Blomeyer-Bartenstein. Martin brought…
“Kristallnacht taught several lessons. It taught those who were the source of prejudice that a whole people can be demonised; that a whole nation can be turned totally and obscenely against a decent, hard-working, creative, loyal and integral part of its own society. This point was made on 19 August…
Extracts from Sir Martin’s unpublished diary Coming to Israel on 4 October 1973 to research Churchill’s 1921 visit there, Sir Martin was caught up in the conflict as a volunteer, and keen to record history as it happened: 5.30 am. Give a lift to an Englishman trying to get to…
Churchill for today, Teaching the Next Generation: Finest Hour 73, Winter 1991-92. “Why study Churchill?” I am often asked. “Surely he has nothing to say to us today?” Yet in my own work, as I open file after file of Churchill’s archive, from his entry into Government in 1905 to…
From The Book of Regrets Compiled by Juliet Solomon as a fundraiser for the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery JR Books Ltd 2007 Having been fortunate in my life as a historian, writing the books I wanted to write and lecturing about my work to audiences worldwide, I have no regrets…
FT Magazine 29/30 July 2006 J.R.R. Tolkien and the Somme were inextricably linked. I learned this forty-four years ago, shortly after I was elected to my first university appointment, at Merton College, Oxford. I was twenty-six years old. In those days there was a strict seating order at college dinners.…
The impact of the Vrba-Wetzler Report of June 1944 and Raoul Wallenberg’s mission to Budapest, July 1944. As told to and quoted by Robin Vrba, Jewish Heritage Museum, New York, 6 May 2012 Introductory talk to Holocaust educators. The direct link between Rudi’s Report and Wallenberg was not through Sweden, but…
Published in Churchillians By-The-Bay. Quarterly E-Newsletter, Second Quarter, 2009. Volume 1, Number 2 – Became Glow-worm No one had more power – on paper at least – than Winston Churchill. On 10 May 1940, having become Prime Minister, he appointed himself Minister of Defence. He made up his government from all three…
Sir Martin writes: On 25 and 26 July 1939, five weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War – and while Churchill was still in opposition to the government of the day, in his tenth year in the political wilderness – senior Polish Intelligence officers in Warsaw handed over…
The Times, 27 January 2005 “Could Britain have done more to stop the horrors of Auschwitz?” Sir Martin writes: From the summer of 1942 until the spring of 1944 more than a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz, where they were either murdered upon arrival, or used as slave labourers.…