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Personal narratives

War Games

by Brian Turner,

By Brian Turner, from My Life as a Foreign Country, out next month from W. W. Norton. Turner, a veteran of the Iraq war, is the author of two books…

Invasion Diary

by Vernon Bartlett,

Tuesday, June 6. I turned on the radio for the eight a.m. news. The announcer spoke about special warnings which had been broadcast to our Allies in Western Europe. There…

Voltaire in Vichy

by Jean Guéhenno,Translated by David Ball,

By Jean Guéhenno, from Diary of the Dark Years, 1940–1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, out this month from Oxford University Press. Guéhenno (1890–1978) was a writer,…

Army of Shadows

by Marcelle Hamel-Hateau,

From a memoir written in 1944 by Marcelle Hamel-Hateau, a schoolteacher in the Norman village of Neuville-au-Plain, included in D-Day Through French Eyes, by Mary Louise Roberts, published last month…

Life During Wartime

by Janine di Giovanni,

Remembering the siege of Sarajevo

Southern Discomfort

by LeRoy Wiley Gresham,

From the unpublished diaries of LeRoy Wiley Gresham (1847–65), son of John J. Gresham, twice mayor of Macon, Georgia. LeRoy, a longtime invalid confined to his bed or to a…

A Question of Circumstances

by Luigi Pintor,Translated by Gregory Elliott,

From Servabo: A Fin de Siècle Memoir, first published in Italian in 1991, and included in Memories from the Twentieth Century, edited by Alberto Toscano, a collection of three of…

The People’s Assembly

by Sarah A. Topol,

How Egypt lost its parliament

Rethinking the Kool-Aid

by Leigh Fondakowski,

War Dogs

by Aleksandar Hemon,

Eye of the Drone

From statements made in February by the families of victims and survivors of a March 17, 2011, drone attack in the village of Datta Khel in the Pakistani region of…