Conservative History Journal

At dawn of June 22, 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Soviet Union. No, not the invasion of Russia. They moved fast, largely because the Soviet armed forces were unprepared, what with the huge purges in 1938, the continuing movement of prisoners east-wards from the Baltic states and eastern Poland and the inexplicable trust Stalin put in Hitler, but they did not reach what we might call Russia for several weeks....

A couple of weeks ago I was reminded that I did not blog last year about the most important anniversary of all, in a year full of important anniversaries, and that is the publication of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps in the autumn of 1915. It was written by a convalescing Buchan, already a well known writer, in a couple of weeks, was serialized in Blackwood's Magazine in August and September and published as a book in October. As...