WW2

How Esmond Romilly went from being a posh Wellington schoolboy to a fierce anti-fascist... The British aristocracy has produced a number of over the years, but few so deeply committed to the cause as Esmond Romilly.

Today in 1944, after four, brutal years of Nazi occupation, Paris was liberated by a motley coalition of left-wing Partisans, Spanish Republicans, and Allied soldiers.

The composer Dmitri Shostakovich died today in 1975. Decades earlier, during WW2, his Seventh Symphony became a global beacon of resistance to the Nazi empire when it was performed by a half-starved orchestra during the siege of Leningrad.