Shoumojit Banerjee

Peter o' Toole in 'The Night of the Generals' (1967), which remains vastly underrated despite its trenchant probing of the Nazi psyche. This week marks yet another anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. The dating of the twentieth century’s most cataclysmic war, always a matter of controversy, has definitively begun to shift in both popular and academic histories to underscore its global dimensions. In the past two decades, the war’s historiography has steadily pushed...

From Teutonic fortresses to modern missile garrisons, the contested geography of the Baltic has made Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, a recurring European flashpoint. Russian naval and missile forces make Kaliningrad a strategic hinge on NATO’s eastern flank. In 1736, Swiss polymath and mathematician Leonhard Euler sat down to solve a quirky civic obsession that Königsberg was renowned for: how to stroll across all seven bridges of the historic capital of the East Prussian city exactly once. His...

Sergio Leone turned the Western inside out with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, transforming America’s frontier myth with irony, violence and Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable music. Eli Wallach as 'Tuco' and Clint Eastwood as 'Blondie' in Sergio Leone's genre-bending 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' (1966). Three men stand in an old cemetery in a desolate landscape, facing one another in the now-famous Mexican standoff during the American Civil War. The war is raging somewhere beyond the...