Light as a soufflé but also tart and bitter, Vittorio De Sica's Marriage Italian Style is a sparkling comedy of attraction with touches of darkness that place it well above that most maligned of genres, the romantic melodrama. For a start, its meet cute couple meet in a brothel, in which patron Domenico (Marcello Mastroianni) finds teenage prostitute, Filumena (Sophia Loren) hiding in a wardrobe as buildings are evacuated during a World War II bombing raid.

We track their romance…

Too often, history disappears in a fog of maths. We all know the year the Battle of Hastings was fought, or the date Columbus discovered the Americas, but beyond that the details aren't so clear. We know more about WWII, chiefly because it was the first war of the media age, documented in real time by radio coverage and for posterity on film. We can counter the claims of holocaust deniers thanks to footage shot by allied cameramen during the…