The limited setting allows the characters to shine. Broken, fragile, and desperate, they represent the harrows of war. The people they once were are now a mere figment of their pasts. They are all jaded by the experience and looking to end their wars in their own ways. Greed, retribution and survival all come into play.  

Whilst many I’m sure would love more battle scenes, Hell Hath no Fury has more of a film noir feel about it and for that, it should be praised. At a running time of 90 minutes, it is a good portrayal of character-driven drama. Despite being small in scale it is strong in performances with Nina Bergman in particular excelling as Marie.

This is a film that highlights the desperation of those involved in war and the lengths they will go to survive. Hell Hath no Fury is certainly one to check out in terms of entertainment but it might be an idea to take your history hat off for this one. ​

Hell Hath No Fury is released on Digital Download and DVD on the 16th May.
​Cert: 18
Run time: 94 mins
Ratio: 16:9
Audio: 2.0 / 5.1 Dolby Digital

by Philip Oltermann 

Berlin, 1982. Morale is at rock bottom in East Germany as the spectre of an all-out nuclear war looms. The Ministry for State Security is hunting for creative new weapons in the war against the class enemy - and their solution is stranger than fiction. Rather than guns, tanks, or bombs, the Stasi develop a programme to fight capitalism through rhyme and verse, winning the culture war through poetry - and the result is the most bizarre book club in history.

Consisting of a small group of spies, soldiers and border guards - some WW2 veterans, others schoolboy recruits - the 'Working Group of Writing Chekists' met monthly until the Wall fell. In a classroom adorned with portraits of Lenin, they wrote their own poetry and were taught verse, metre, and rhetoric by East German poet Uwe Berger.

The regime hoped that poetry would sharpen the Stasi's 'party sword' by affirming the spies' belief in the words of Marx and Lenin, as well as strengthening the socialist faith of their comrades. But as the agents became steeped in poetry, revelling in its imaginative ambiguity, the result was the opposite. Rather than entrenching State ideology, they began to question it - and following a radical role reversal, the GDR's secret weapon dramatically backfired.

Weaving unseen archival material and exclusive interviews with surviving members, Philip Oltermann reveals the incredible hidden story of a unique experiment: weaponising poetry for politics. Both a gripping true story and a parable about creativity in a surveillance state, this is history writing at its finest.
​

By George ​Tomaziu

Romania allied itself with the Nazis in the  Second World War to protect itself from the Soviet Union and to promote its own brand of fascist nationalism.

When George Tomaziu, who had spent the 1930s preparing for a career as an artist, was invited to spy for Britain, he agreed because Britain then represented the only possible bulwark against Nazism.

He went on to monitor German troop movements through Romania towards the Russian front, observing, on one occasion, the mass-killing of Jews in the small Ukrainian town of Brailov.

He knew he might be arrested, tortured and killed by Romania’s right-wing regime but thought that if he survived, his contribution to the war effort would be recognised. It wasn’t.

After Romania turned Communist, he was sent back to prison in 1950 and kept him there for 13 years. Following his release, the British helped him get out of Romania and he settled in Paris. This is his memoir.

In the summer of 1962 Joachim Rudolph and a team of diggers had an idea. Having previously escaped to the West of Berlin, Rudolph was now heading back to East, only this time, he was going underneath the Berlin Wall in order to help others escape. What followed was a 135-metre tunnel that ran between a factory building in the west and a tenement block cellar in the east. It would be one of the most spectacular escape plans devised. It had been attempted before but many attempts had either failed or were foiled by the infamous Stasi. It would become known as Tunnel 29 after the 29 people who managed to escape using it.

​If like me, you tuned into Helena Merriman's excellent podcast then you will already know what to expect from Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall. Merriman excels in producing podcasts but can this be translated into book form?
​
In short, the answer is, of course. Much of that is due to how Merriman chooses to retell the story. Short, sharp chapters give the narrative the element of the same level of urgency felt by those recalling their stories. It gives it a similar feel to the award-winning podcast at the pace of an extremely frantic thriller complete with twists and turns that will keep the reader gripped.

Ever since Anna Funder's Stasiland, writers have gone in search of more stories and interviews that help to form this new history of the GDR (German Democratic Republic). Whilst the story of Tunnel 29 is nothing new, Merriman reminds us that it is how you tell the story that really counts.

The first time this story was told was back in 1962 as Joachim Rudolph and his team were tunnelling back into the GDR as dozens of men, women and children; were willing to risk everything to escape. Back then, of course, the television cameras were on them capturing the whole event in real-time.

Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with the survivors, and thousands of pages of Stasi documents, Helena Merriman has plenty to work with which adds even more to the already excellent podcast. In many ways, you could consider this to be the director's cut version of the podcast and Merriman does not disappoint.

Tunnel 29 has the feel of classic cold war fiction yet as we know, the truth is often stranger and if anything, more riveting. As the group is infiltrated by the Stasi the pressure is on, not only for the group of diggers but also those waiting in the GDR to make their escape. The tension of the situation is palpable, we feel every centimetre dug and every drop of sweat that hits the floor. This is where Tunnel 29 excels. In many respects, Merriman is a storyteller first and at times it really shows.

The context of the situation in the GDR is dealt with swiftly but concisely. For those expecting more than this then don't expect much. Merriman after all is not a historian. Instead the main focus is Joachim Rudolph, the other diggers, and those who escaped. As a journalist, she favours their stories and rightly so. This after all, is their story.

For fans of the podcast this is a must-read giving you much more detail to its predecessor. With over 6 million downloads, the podcast produced by Merriman is a hit and this book deserves similar praise.

For those that haven't heard the podcast (something you should certainly do) then fear not as this book covers everything and more.

1922 was a year of great turbulence and upheaval. The world had just emerged from a war that had killed millions of people and a global pandemic that had ended the lives of tens of millions more. The events from this pivotal year reverberated throughout the rest of the twentieth century and still affect us today, in many different ways, such as the shaping of Modern Ireland as we know it.

In a sequence of vividly written sketches, Nick Rennison conjures up the drama and diversity of this extraordinary year. Major global developments in history, politics, medicine, art and culture include:

• The fall of the Ottoman Empire and creation of the Soviet Union
• Mussolini's Italy became the first Fascist state
• Insulin first being used as a treatment for diabetes – medication which continues to save and improve lives today
• The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, the arrest of Mahatma Gandhi,the death of Marcel Proust and the election of a new pope
• The foundation of the BBC and publication of arguably the most influential novel of the century (James Joyce’s Ulysses) followed by that of the most influential poem (TS Eliot’s The Waste Land)

Through a series of snapshots of events, from murders to football matches, from epoch-changing events like the establishment of the Soviet Union to artistic landmarks, Nick Rennison gives us a sense of what the world was like 100 years ago and provides a fascinating portrait of this rollercoaster of a year.

This book tells the incredible story of the crack team of ordinary men and women, from a range of nations, who revolutionised the efficiency of the Allies' air campaign over mainland Europe and helped to deliver the decisive victory over Nazi Germany.

A secret force of 20,000 servicemen, often teenagers or in their early twenties, the Pathfinders was the corps d’elite of Britain’s air bombing campaign that elevated Bomber Command from an impotent force on the cusp of disintegration in 1942 to one capable of razing whole German cities to the ground in a single night, striking with devastating accuracy, inspiring fear and loathing in Hitler's senior command.

At the very heart of the Pathfinders’ formation, evolution and ongoing survival lay a battle of alpha-male personalities, giant egos and entrenched rivalries. This book reveals the fascinating story of how the Pathfinder force was created and how it became a pawn in a bitter power struggle between senior commanders which threatened to tear Bomber Command apart.

With exclusive interviews with remaining survivors, personal diaries, previously classified records and never-before seen photographs, The Pathfinders brings to life the characters of the young airmen and women who took to the skies in legendary British aircraft such as the Lancaster and the Mosquito, facing almost unimaginable levels of violence from enemy fighter planes to strike at the heart of the Nazi war machine.

The secret of this elite squadron’s success was an unlikely combination of characters, including a humble university chemistry lecturer and fireworks boffin, a clairvoyant Scottish scientist who invented the world’s first bombing device that could see in the dark, and an abrasive Australian cowboy considered to be one of the most talented airmen of the war.

This riveting book also tells the tales of the exceptionally brave effort made by thousands of ordinary young men thrust into extraordinary circumstances as Pathfinders, who didn’t know or really care about the political machinations of their bosses. Their fight was for survival and their job was clear: to fly over enemy territory to locate and ‘mark’ targets in the dark so that the main force of Bomber Command’s aircraft following behind could bomb as accurately as possible.

We meet Ulric Cross, from Trinidad, a Mosquito Navigator flying in the Night Light Striking Force, who became the most decorated West Indian of the Second World War. Dubbed ‘The Black Hornet’, he flew dozens of dangerous missions over enemy territory, avoiding being killed and helping prevent up to 200 bombers being shot down in a daring mission over Berlin in 1943. We are also introduced to one of the last Pathfinders still alive today - Geordie Lancaster pilot Ernie Holmes, who reveals the astonishing story of how he was blown out of his Lancaster bomber at 17,000 feet and spent a month on the run before being betrayed to the Gestapo. And Colin Bell, one of the last surviving Second World War Mosquito pilots, and now aged 100, who flew fifty operations over Nazi Germany and who reveals how he cheated death at the hands of a German Luftwaffe jet fighter almost 80 years ago.

Thanks almost exclusively to the Pathfinders, the numbers of Bomber Command crews reaching their targets rose from as low as 25 per cent in August 1942 to 95 per cent in some operations in April 1945. This increasing accuracy played a critical role in the precision bombing ahead of the Allied D-Day invasion in June 1944 and the advance across Europe.

The huge impact made by the Pathfinders force, and its contribution towards the overall war effort, is perhaps best summed up by a newspaper article published July 1944 in which the journalist wrote:

“The Pathfinders are the aces of Bomber Command. Without them Bomber Command could never be the devastating force it is today. Without them the strategic long‐range hammering of German cities could never have taken place during the last two years. Without them the softening‐up of the enemy’s communication lines, the smashing of railway centres in the occupied countries to produce the chaos that prepared the way for our invasion, could never have happened.”

Intrepid journalist Nellie Bly raced through a ‘man’s world’ — alone and literally with just the clothes on her back — to beat the fictional record set by Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days.

She won the race on 25 January 1890, covering 21,740 miles by ocean liner and train in 72 days, and became a global celebrity. Although best known for
her record-breaking journey, even more importantly Nellie Bly pioneered investigative journalism and paved the way for women in the newsroo

Throughout her career, Bly’s reportage gave voices to vulnerable people and challenged oppression wherever she found it. Her steadfast conviction that ‘nothing is impossible’ makes the world she circled a
better place.

Adventurer, journalist and author, Rosemary J Brown, set off 125 years later to retrace Nellie Bly’s footsteps in an expedition registered with the Royal Geographical Society. Through her recreation of that epic global journey, she brings to life Nellie Bly’s remarkable achievements and shines a light on one of the world's greatest female adventurers and a    forgotten heroine of history.

About the Author

Journalist Rosemary J Brown writes for publications in the UK, USA and France. In her quest to get female adventurers like Nellie Bly ‘back on the map’, she lectures at the Globetrotters Club, Women of the World festivals and schools, and helped to organise the first Heritage of Women in Exploration conference at the Royal Geographical Society.