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If you’ve ever wondered how you might fare in armed combat, the first 20 minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is likely to make you thank your lucky stars you were born too late to storm the Normandy beaches on June 6 1944. I suspect many of us will identify with those men who were absolutely turned to stone by fear. And yet these young men, mainly conscripts, screwed their courage to the sticking point and did the job the fate had chosen for them, heroes all.
The film’s vivid depiction of American GIs assaulting Omaha beach at the start of D-day is pyrotechnic and terrifying and is often cited as the most accurate filmic depiction of the second world war. But here are ten of the best films about D-day to help you make up your own mind.
The UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, had a particularly bad D-day this week, leaving his foreign secretary, David Cameron, to deputise for him for the tiresome business of being photographed with the US and French presidents and the German chancellor while he hot-footed it back home to do a pre-arranged interview to explain the provenance of his now-discredited Labour tax claims. He’d hoped those claims would inflict a mortal wound on Keir Starmer during their first head-to-head debate this week. Now, perhaps too late, he has discovered the truth of that old political adage: beware of weaponising information, lest it be turned against you.
As we marked 100 years since the death of Franz Kafka this week, it was apt that in the background the Post Office inquiry ground on. If anyone could understand the alienation and guilt felt by Kafka’s Josef K, it’ll be the Post Office subpostmasters who were accused of crimes they had not committed and had no way to disprove. We can only thank providence that the victims of this travesty have been able to fight back, unlike Kafka’s doomed protagonist.
This week we also worried about what appears to be a dramatic escalation in hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, we looked at the risk of lymphoma associated with tattoos and we brought you reviews of the six shortlisted novels
from the Women’s prize for fiction.
From our friends and colleagues in our global network, we look, in the wake of the South African election, at how the ANC turned from being a liberation movement to a mere political party that is losing its lustre. Meanwhile, after the election in India, we learned how Modi’s sectarian campaign style failed to resonate with voters. And we discovered what EU citizens want asylum policy to look like.
Do try to make time to listen to our podcast, The Conversation Weekly. This week’s episode looks at what happens in our brains when we experience a state of “creative flow”.
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