It’s spring of 1941 and Britain stands alone against Hitler’s Germany. The British aircraft dropping their bombs on German military and manufacturing bases, and cities, were having an effect on that nation’s morale and production, but every downed British aircraft meant fewer experienced airmen.

“What are you reading after the election?” a friend asked me last week. She asked me because she had picked a book specifically for the occasion. She was reading “Democracy in America.”

“De Tocqueville?”

“Yes,” she said. “When I had to read it for school it was boring. It’s not boring now.” 

Cold weather means more time indoors, and more time indoors means more time for books. Here are three for the season of Jack Frost, sweaters and robust beverages.  

In 1933 Germany, headmistress Anna Essinger was ordered by the newly-elected Nazi party to fly a Nazi flag above her school.