News

The author of the definitive account of the Third Reich on revisiting nazism one last time, the ongoing need to discredit Holocaust denial and fact-checking Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest

Richard J Evans was regius professor of history at Cambridge University from 2008 to retirement in 2014. In the millennium year, he served as the expert witness for Penguin Books in the libel case brought unsuccessfully by Holocaust-denier David Irving. Evans’s three-volume history of the Third Reich, completed in 2008, is the definitive account. A new book, Hitler’s People, re-examines that history through the life stories of prominent Nazis and supporters of the regime.

After completing your trilogy on the Third Reich, why did you want to return to this material now?

There were several reasons. One was that the biographical approach to German history became very unfashionable – because historians were wary of the Nazi cult of personality.

Exclusive: The Chelsea Detective is back for more sleuthing on the glamorous streets of West London.

AMC Networks’ streamer Acorn TV and Germany’s Zdf have ordered a third season of the mystery drama series set on the glamorous streets of Chelsea, with Adrian Scarborough and Vanessa Emme reprising their roles as Detective Inspector Max Arnold and Detective Sergeant Layla Walsh, respectively. A first-look image is above.

Filming has begun in and around London on a four feature-length episodes in which the duo explore murky crimes such as the tragic death of a 2000s poster, the impenetrable world of the U.S. Embassy, the splendor of Kew Gardens, a classic music academy and a climate scientist found dead in a supercar. Also new is Max embarking on couples therapy with his estranged wife Astrid (Anamaria Marinca) and Layla getting used to living in London as her partner,...

Exclusive: Reign’s Toby Regbo is to star in the third and final season of Italian drama Medici.

The series will air over four nights in a primetime slot on Italian broadcaster Rai from December 2 with Netflix airing it after its domestic launch in early 2020. It will be branded an original Netflix series in the U.S., UK, Ireland, Canada, India and Taiwan.

Regbo will star alongside Daniel Sharman, and Synnøve Karlsen as well as Francesco Montanari and John Lynch, who joins for Medici The Magnificent: Final Season. Elsewhere, Troy: Fall of a City’s Johnny Harris and Bedlam’s Jack Roth form part of the international cast with Callum Blake, Aurora Ruffino and Sebastian De Souza.

Medici The Magnificent: Final Season starts a few months after the infamous Pazzi conspiracy that cost the life of Lorenzo’s brother, and nearly his own. Lorenzo, now a more complex and conflicted character,...

Canadian director Christian Duguay is directing the third season of Frank Spotnitz’s “Medici” television saga, which has started shooting in Rome with Italian actor Francesco Montanari attached to play radical preacher Girolamo Savonarola, who became leader of Florence after the Medici family’s overthrow in 1494.

Duguay succeeds Jon Cassar (“24”), who helmed “Medici: Masters of Florence. The Magnificent Part I,” which was the show’s second season.

Montanari, who broke out internationally with Sky’s “Crime Novel,” more recently played the relentless anti-Mafia prosecutor who is the central character in pubcaster Rai’s hit “The Hunter.” He won the best performance prize for this role at the Cannesseries festival in April.

In the third “Medici” season, “Medici: Masters of Florence. The Magnificent Part II,” Florentine statesman and ruler Lorenzo De Medici, played by Daniel Sharman, “has become a man who will have to fight against his demons and defend Florence...

Director: Gillies MacKinnon; Screenwriter: Ian Kershaw; Starring: Eddie Izzard, Karl Davies, Laura Fraser, Julian Rhind-Tutt, David Hayman, Celyn Jones; Running time: 89 mins; Certificate: Tbc

Look around you. Notice the distinct lack of swastikas lining every street? The world would have been a very different place had it not been for heroes like Robert Watson Watt, the subject of Gillies MacKinnon's absorbing film. Boasting a majestic leading performance from Eddie Izzard, Castles in the Sky conveys the triumph of innovation and tenacity against opponents fighting for the same side during World War II.

It's remarkable that the Battle of Britain wasn't a victory for Adolf Hitler, with his Luftwaffe outnumbering Raf planes by a shocking 3:1. This result was determined by Robert Watson Watt (Izzard), a likeable ball of eccentricity who conjured up an idea on how to detect approaching enemy aircraft from afar. Not that the government bureaucrats were impressed,...

Eddie Izzard stars in Castles In The Sky, a film about the invention of radar. Here's our review...

There is a certain timeslot from days gone by, in your local independent cinema, that Castles In The Sky utterly belongs to. The weekend afternoon matinee slot, designed specifically for families, that I remember from my time working in a cinema as the 'Tired Daddy Doesn't Want to Answer His Five Year Old's Innocent Yet Fiendish Questions' slot. Also it rained popcorn. Now this slot mostly consists of variable animated fare put on at 10.15 in the morning by chain cinemas who don't appreciate the sanctity of the lie-in. This is a shame, as Castles In The Sky evokes the nostalgia of films like Memphis Belle, despite being tonally more similar to movies such as the 2005 Lassie picture.

Based on a true story, the depiction of Robert Watson Watt and Skip Wilkins'...

Julie Hesmondhalgh has dedicated her National Television Award to her late father. The 'Coronation Street' actress, whose character Hayley Cropper took her own life on Monday night (20.01.14) after suffering from inoperable pancreatic cancer, won best Serial Drama Performance at the annual ceremony in London's O2 Arena tonight (22.01.14) and paid tribute to her dad John Hesmondhalgh, who passed away in January 2013 after a long battle with Parkinson's Disease, as well as her husband Ian Kershaw. Speaking backstage, the 43-year-old star said: ''I've dedicated it to my dad who died last year, who was a really, really wonderful man. And I...

Julie Hesmondhalgh has dedicated her National Television Award to her late father. The 'Coronation Street' actress, whose character Hayley Cropper took her own life on Monday night (20.01.14) after suffering from inoperable pancreatic cancer, won best Serial Drama Performance at the annual ceremony in London's O2 Arena tonight (22.01.14) and paid tribute to her dad John Hesmondhalgh, who passed away in January 2013 after a long battle with Parkinson's Disease, as well as her husband Ian Kershaw. Speaking backstage, the 43-year-old star said: ''I've dedicated it to my dad who died last year, who was a really, really wonderful man. And I...

Cinema has always liked telling a good life story, and all kinds of biography – from the humblest to the starriest – have been given a filmic going-over. The Guardian and Observer's critics pick the 10 best in a very crowded field

• Top 10 animated movies

• Top 10 silent movies

• Top 10 sports movies

• Top 10 film noir

• Top 10 musicals

• Top 10 martial arts movies

• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s

10. Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

This is the most radical of all biopics. It does exactly what it promises, breaking the Canadian pianist's intense and troubled life into concentrated fragments. Reassembly is left to the viewer. When he began working on the screenplay with Don McKellar, the writer-director François Girard recognised the pitfalls of the genre. "There are many traps," he said. "The main temptation is to try to cram everything about a life into one film. What you need is a radical idea...

A cerebral film based on a memoir by Hitler's private secretary lifts the lid on Feathers McGraw's role in the Führer's overthrow

Downfall (2004)

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel

Entertainment grade: A–

History grade: A–

On 20 April 1945, as the second world war drew to its conclusion, Soviet forces began to shell the centre of Berlin.

People

The film is bookended by documentary footage of the splendidly named Traudl Humps, Adolf Hitler's private secretary from 1942-45. In 1947, she wrote a memoir. It was published in 2002 under her less thrilling married name, Traudl Junge. The film draws extensively on the book, especially for the relationship between Hitler (Bruno Ganz, in the performance of a lifetime) and his girlfriend, Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler). Junge paints Eva as a needy, delusional figure – dancing around her old living room "in a desperate frenzy, like a woman who has already felt the faint breath of death". Another eyewitness,...