In 2017 the director Christopher Nolan brought Dunkirk back to cinema screens with Dunkirk, a film about the hurried and agonising retreat of the Allied armies from the European mainland in 1940. The German advance through France had been unstoppable, and the Second World War was only months old. That evacuation is the best-known episode […]

Two of the most prominent belligerents of World War II ended up clashing despite having initially fought on the same side, and it wasn’t until 1951, six years after the end of the conflict, that they signed an unusual peace. One of them was Italy, obviously, where the government that succeeded Mussolini signed an armistice […]