In the Christmas issue of The Lamp, Theodore Dalrymple reviews a highly recommended book on the Marshal Pétain and his Vichy regime, written by British history professor Julian Jackson.

Thank you to our reader from Portugal, António S., for bringing this to my attention. I will be posting the two other previously published Dalrymple essays at The Lamp in due course.

I cannot praise this book highly enough. It reads like a drama, and the writer is a model of impartiality. He does not simplify the labyrinthine complexities of history, only a few of which I have touched upon, to assume an easy moral superiority.