Malcolm Gaskill

Few men wanted to fire the first shot or even pick a side, still less leave their glowing hearths to go campaigning. One can imagine the mood of the gardener who stopped writing about tulips in his notebook and began a new section headed: ‘The Postures of the Musket’. And when the gardeners and grocers, cobblers and carpenters did pick sides they couldn’t always say why.

Servants’ privileges, which could be and were defended at law, didn’t develop from a concept of individual ‘human rights’, but from a belief that patriarchy worked best when it was considerate and consensual. Anything else was domestic tyranny, and mistreatment by a master or mistress signified a larger failing of governance. Hierarchical, yet governed by mutual obligation, households should be exemplars of political order. If a servant (or a wife) needed beating, something was wrong with the patriarch wielding the stick.

This is​ what happens when you die. Electricity stops flowing through your neural circuitry and consciousness shuts down as though a switch has been flicked. Blood keeps moving for a while, ebbing without the heart’s propulsion before succumbing to gravity and pooling in the lower back where it congeals. Starved of oxygen, cells are dismantled by enzymes with nothing else to do now life is at an end.

On​ 23 March 1944 Italian resistance fighters ambushed an SS company marching up via Rasella, a quiet street in central Rome. At 3.45 p.m. Rosario Bentivegna, a 21-year-old medical student, lit the fuse on a bomb hidden in a dustcart, then walked away. Fifty seconds later the bomb exploded. Bentivegna’s comrades opened fire and hurled grenades, then fled through the backstreets. More...

In​ the summer of 1942, an Oxfordshire housewife began a series of brief encounters with a man who was not her husband. They met at a café in Birmingham and then in Banbury on the edge of the Cotswolds, where they strolled arm in arm, like lovers trying to forget the war. They had much in common: both were cultured Germans, refugees from the Nazis. But their secret meetings...