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Yay The Tudors are back! Review your royal history at Pop Tudors. After watching the first episode of season 3, go to Raucous Royals to compare the historical Tudors with the TV Tudors. Judging from the Holbein portrait, Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ waistline is only slightly smaller than the real Henry VIII’s ankle.

Photo: Kim Jong-Il as a puppet in Team America

In late 1993, when North Korea was gearing up to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, fears of an imminent war broke out across the Korean Peninsula. The eyes of the world were firmly fixed on the region. Not a day passed without some international coverage of the North Korean nuclear crisis.

A short while later, Kim Jong Il was named the commander in chief of the Korean People’s Army.

I Was Kim Jong-Il’s Teacher—Then He Had My Family Killed. By Kim Hyun Sik. Inside the World of Kim Jong Il, a photo essay in Foreign Policy.

I’ve been looking for a copy of the WWII documentary The World At War, particularly the episode on Stalingrad. In the meantime I watched the 2-disc documentary The World in Conflict: 1931-1945. It’s a collection of newreels and archival footage, mostly US Army propaganda—useful for historians, I suppose, but dry and unenlightening, with very little mention of Stalingrad.

The History Channel series Hitler’s War is more compelling: it contains interviews with survivors of the Battle of Stalingrad, both Russian Red Army and German Sixth Army. A German soldier recounts how early on, when they were winning, they saw Russian women and children gathered around a dead horse, cutting it up for meat. They regarded the besieged, starving Russians with disgust and contempt. A year later there were reports of cannibalism among the Germans, who were forced to hold on when they were surrounded. Only the very badly injured were airlifted out—one of every three planes was shot down—and one pilot recalls how the wounded were covered in newspaper in a vain attempt to keep their insides in.

Back in Germany Hitler was insisting that Stalingrad was a victory.

Afterwards I read Gert Ledig’s The Stalin Front (translated by Michael Hofmann), a harrowing novel of carnage and death, so intense it reads like a long hallucination.

The Lance-Corporal couldn’t turn in his grave, because he didn’t have one. Some three versts from Podrova, forty versts south of Leningrad, he had been caught in a salvo of rockets, been thrown up in the air, and with severed hands and head dangling, been impaled on the skeletal branches of what once had been a tree.

The NCO, who was writhing on the ground with a piece of shrapnel in his belly, had no idea what was keeping his machine-gunner. It didn’t occur to him to look up. He had his hands full with himself.

“His hands full with himself”. The breezy, almost droll way the author describes a man trying to keep his guts from spilling out magnifies the horror of his situation. The horror is so extreme that it’s absurd: the brain protects itself by resorting to black humor.

Then in the middle of bloody chaos, a quiet moment:The grass under her feet felt soft like cottonwool. The meadow was insanely green.

Later I will recover from this savagery by reading Jane Austen. (Nothing can be as good as Persuasion, but I hope Emma will be close.) Relationships are also a kind of warfare, but the protagonists usually get to keep their intestines.

Today is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. Adrian Desmond writes that while we regard On the Origin of Species as a triumph of disinterested scientific reason, Darwin was influenced by his fervent belief in the anti-slavery movement. Ironically he also justified colonial eradication. “To celebrate historical figures we have first to understand them,” and Darwin was a paradoxical thinker.

Shackled legs, thumbscrews used to crush the fingers of errant female slaves, a six-year-old boy horse-whipped for handing out water in a dirty glass: these sound like scenes from a modern horror story, but all were seen by the young Charles Darwin on his travels with the Beagle around the slave-owning continent of South America. You will find no mention of them in the proudly reasoned, scientific pages of On the Origin of Species. Glance at Darwin’s journals, private notebooks and family background, however, and you will find a man immersed in the rhetoric and fervent belief of the anti-slavery movement. Was the public man of science influenced by these private passions?

Colonel Claus Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg and Tom Cruise

What a gyp. I expected Valkyrie to be ghastly but it’s quite decent. Somewhat stiff, but not the disaster I’d been led to expect. Clearly everyone’s turned on Tom Cruise: after years of sucking up to him they’ve decided that he’s mad and they have to cover up their lip prints on his shoes.

Valkyrie’s two main problems: the material, and Tom Cruise. Director Bryan Singer and writer Christopher McQuarrie signed on to make a thriller about an event whose outcome is well-known. (The audience may be unaware of the plots in the German military establishment to kill Hitler, but they have some idea that Hitler was not assassinated by his own men. At least I hope they do. Many years ago I was at a screening of Romeo and Juliet, and the girls sitting behind me were genuinely shocked at the ending.) Singer and McQuarrie may have brought us The Usual Suspects, but barring an alternative-history approach I don’t see how they could’ve Keyser Soze’d this material. Parts of it are thrilling, though. In one squirm-inducing scene, Stauffenberg has to arm the bomb with his one hand but it keeps slipping from his grasp.

Then there is Cruise. He is miscast as an aristocratic German patriot. He does not convey Stauffenberg’s moral convictions, inner conflict, or the burden of command. Though he is in his 40s, he still comes across as a boy playing dress-up. In one scene Stauffenberg, who lost an eye while serving in North Africa, takes off his eyepatch to put on a glass eye cover. This is interesting because Cruise’s liabilities as an actor are his eyes and his voice. His eyes are cold and expressionless—he is a cypher, which is why he is effective at playing assholes (Rainman—too bad the audience was taken in by Hoffman’s autistic savant act, Magnolia—they should’ve given him the Oscar so he would stop trying so hard, and Tropic Thunder—it’s a good idea to make him unrecognizable). The glass eye: redundant. As for his voice, it is not one to inspire awe and loyalty among his men, and when he raises it, it gets whiny.

Stauffenberg is an old school hero-type role, and Tom just doesn’t have the heft. Halfway through the movie, Thomas Kretschmann turns up—there’s an old school hero type, and he’s already played a sympathetic Nazi in Polanski’s The Pianist. As for the rest of the cast, Kenneth Branagh appears early on as a conspirator, only to be sent to the front and replaced by Cruise. You feel the loss. Oy, the ups and downs of a career: Branagh played Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference in the TV movie Conspiracy, and he was so brilliant it was terrifying. Valkyrie has plenty of prestige casting. Tom Wilkinson and Terence Stamp walk through their roles and Tom Hollander is properly nasty. Bill Nighy and Eddie Izzard play a couple of generals who are in on the plot. I don’t know about you, but if I were planning to kill the Fuhrer, Nighy and Izzard would not be my go-to guys.

As the conspiracy unfolds many documents are prepared and telegrams sent out, and that’s when you see how the Germans nearly took over the world: their spelling and typing are perfect.

Background reading: Why did Stauffenberg plant the bomb? by Richard J. Evans. Karl Heinz Bohrer disagrees.

One of the most important Roman discoveries of the last fifteen years is still little known. Unearthed in northern Greece, it is the monument erected to commemorate the naval battle of Actium in 31 BC, fought between Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) on the one side and Mark Antony, with his lover and financial backer, Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt, on the other. Victory effectively handed to Octavian control of the Roman world, and ended the decade of civil wars that had followed the assassination of Julius Caesar. Antony and Cleopatra, the rival claimants to power, sloped back to Alexandria, the capital of Egypt. The vast memorial to the battle is a major work of Roman state art, with terraces, colonnades, freestanding statues, and a large altar covered with sculpture celebrating the new Augustan regime. It stood on a prominent headland, overlooking the site of the battle, reportedly on the exact spot where Octavian had pitched his tent before the engagement and just outside his new city of Nikopolis (“Victory Town”)…

Mary Beard reviews Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley.