THE UNLIKELY LINK BETWEEN NUREMBERG AND THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA:

Hungary is a country still feeling the long aftershocks of World War Two and the Holocaust. Those shocks seem clearer than ever after the years I have spent researching The Nuremberg Women, my new book on the trials. We all have an image of those trials in our head: the famous men judging and being judged in the courtroom, immortalized in photographs, or in Laura Knight’s painting, which is on permanent display at the Imperial War Museum. Women are pushed to the margins. But so many intriguing women played their part, from Knight herself to Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, the French Resistance hero who gave the most devastating testimony of the trial.

Anyone who launches a new book is hoping desperately that no other big cultural event will come along and eclipse it. So imagine my horror when I checked the publication date of The Nuremberg Women – April 23 – and realized I was going head-to-head with the premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2. A film about Vogue may not appear to overlap with a book about the first trial for international war crimes, but I have my fears.

That’s understandable. One story is about a ruthless totalitarian feared by all. The other is about Hermann Goering.

Speaking of whom: Judgement of Nuremberg and Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring.