History in the making: inside the Nuremberg trials

Uwe Neumahr’s The Writers’ Castle, translated by Jefferson Chase, is about the reporting of the Nuremberg war crimes trial in 1945-6. The title refers to a mock castle outside Nuremberg where most journalists lived and worked when not in the courtroom. (A number who didn’t get in wrote as if they had been present.) Rebecca West for The New Yorker had an affair with one of the court judges, an unpleasant American called Francis Biddle, and spent much of her time in his well-appointed villa.