Hitchcock

The British are the masters of deceit

From bamboozling the Nazis to fooling the Taleban, nobody lies better than those famous stiff upper lips

Ben Macintyre on the gory reality behind nursery rhymes

A grimly familiar tale in US history

The alleged plot to kill Barack Obama fits a dramatic pattern that began at a theatre 140 years ago

Fitting tribute to our enigmatic nature

Bletchley Park worked because of two great British traits - our secrecy and eccentricity

Creatures of our guilty conscience

As real-life creatures face extinction, mankind is fascinated by the possibility of imaginary ones

The great escape from the truth

The reality of Stalag Luft III was far grimmer than the romanticised derring- depicted in postwar movies

Whodunnits? A cultural religion

The Victorians, like us, were fascinated by logical deduction and a suspicion of the neighbours

The absent fathers of Obama and McCain

How absent parents were crucial in shaping the characters of both Obama and his Republican presidential rival

We’re here . . . and you’re not

Ever since the invention of the British postcard in 1894, holidaymakers have been struggling to find the perfect message

Let's have a universal museum

It's pointless trying to work out who owns ancient art objects. We need to share them around the world

Mamma Mia, how can we resist them?

What made the band great was their lyrics, whether about the Mexican Revolution or money being funny

From national bogeyman to ruinous failure

The waxwork Hitler in Berlin is the latest proof of Germany’s determination to come to terms with a gruesome history

SOS: not Save Our Souls, Sailors, Ships or Skins

SOS is simply the shortest, simplest three-letter arrangement in Morse code: three dots, three dashes and three more dots

A Zimbabwe joke is no laughing matter

Tyrants may try to ban it, but humour has a way of seeping through the cracks of any dictatorship

The authors who let slip the dogs of war

Mercenaries make fine fiction. But in real life they are almost always doomed to failure

Why should these myths be scotched?

Scotland's traditions may well be a fiction. But they are better than England's

Losing such moving monuments is vandalism

Like old soldiers, the Name Trees of Normandy and their wartime carvings should have been left to fade away

Why James Bond will never go out of fashion

There is nothing in popular culture that can quite compare, for passionate enthusiasm, with the fans of Bond, James Bond

Judge a children’s book by its cover

Publishers give us plenty of clues to a title’s target audience; we don’t need read-by dates as well

Russians bring home the Bacon

Snobbery towards the art nouveaux riches is absurd. The rich have always bought up art