Sweet home … Jon Lovitch’s GingerBread Lane, on this year at the New York Hall of Science.Sweet home … Jon Lovitch’s GingerBread Lane, on this year at the New York Hall of Science.Christmas and New Year holidaysThe witch’s house in the two-centuries-old tale of Hansel and Gretel is today inspiring ever more extravagant gingerbread creations and constructions across Europe and the US
Then …The tradition of decorated gingerbread houses began in Germany in the early 1800s, supposedly popularised after the not-so-Christmassy fairytale of Hansel and Gretel was published in 1812. Read More...
BooksObituaryCharles WhitingSensational and serious chronicler of the second world warCharles Whiting, who has died aged 80, was one of the leading figures of the British paperback industry and its 1970s boom in novels drenched in violence and sex. His best-known books were published under the name Leo Kessler and featured the Assault Regiment Wotan, Hitler's hand-picked SS battle group, described by Kessler as "the elite unit of the German Wehrmacht, to be thrown into any battle as a last desperate measure to redress the balance" Read More...
The ObserverUS politics This article is more than 8 years old‘Don’t call me a crypto-Nazi!’ The lost heart of political debateThis article is more than 8 years oldEd VulliamyAn acclaimed film on the TV clash of US intellectuals Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr marks a cultural divide – and reminds us what today’s politics lackThe erudition of the discourse is electrifying: two towering American intellectuals of the riven 1960s at one another like fighting cocks on primetime TV – Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr. Read More...