Simon Schama’s unflinching eye

Simon Schama is not only a great historian but a consummate broadcaster. His much-lauded, most recent documentary, The Road to Auschwitz, may be his finest work, certainly the most personal for a Jewish man born in London just a couple of weeks after the liberation of the death camp by the Red Army. It is, inevitably, anything but easy viewing. Schama casts his cold eye on the almost incomprehensible horror of an industrial slaughter so vast that it ends up ‘gagging’ – his typically evocative description – on human flesh. Most incisively, Schama sees the Holocaust as a European-wide atrocity, beginning his survey in Lithuania, where the brutal antisemitic actions on the streets of Kaunas convinced the Nazis that support for their pathologies would gain widespread support. Unflinching, this remarkable film is an unforgettable reminder that these malign spirits live still within us.

Buchan’s little-known gem

John Buchan’s 1919 thriller, Mr Standfast, may be less well-known than its preceding Richard Hannay novels, The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, but it is every bit as compelling, and more revealing of the author’s thoughts on the nation and politics, as well as religion – it is peppered with quotes and references to John Bunyan’s 17th-century parable Pilgrim’s Progress, which also provides its title. Read straight as a boy’s own romp, or as a state of the nation meditation – or both – it works brilliantly as Brigadier Hannay reaches the Swiss Alps to dash German ambitions.

Klaus Tennstedt, the flawed maestro

The conductor Klaus Tennstedt would have been 100 this week, though given his deserved reputation as a chain-smoking, womanising drinker, he was lucky to make it to 71. Born in East Germany, he was in his mid forties by the time he made it to the West – offered asylum by Sweden – where his brilliance, albeit erratic, was soon recognised. His spell at the London Philharmonic Orchestra, though affected by regular cancellations due to ill health, was a golden period, some of which is captured in this vast collection of his recordings for Warner, not least those of the then newly fashionable Mahler, as well as his beloved Bruckner and Wagner.