What was that?

Can’t remember the name of a book, film or whatever? Mike Hunter has the answers

Dear Mike,
I wonder if you can help me – I’ve recently become something of a history buff, with a particular emphasis on military history. I’m trying to track down information about a figure from World War II. Forgive me if this is obscure, but the fellow I’m talking about was, I think, leader of Germany for a time.

His name, maddeningly, has escaped me, but he was a shortish man, middle-aged, and with black hair swept to the side and a Charlie Chaplin toothbrush moustache. I seem to remember he was generally in military garb, and often gave speeches that were very passionate and rousing. He was, if I remember correctly, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, and – despite that name – was somewhat right-wing.

He must be dead by now I think, or retired at any rate as I haven’t heard of him or seen him on the television for a long time. Any ideas? I have written to the distinguished historian David Irving to pick his brains on this matter, but alas he has not replied.
Thanks in advance for your help,
Christopher Botney, Hove

Dear Christopher,
Achtung! For you, Tommy, the war is over, because I have an answer for you, and “my struggle” (or to put it in German, “mein kampf”) has not been an arduous one. Yes, the figure of whom you speak is surely one of the most recognisable and infamous of the 20th century. He is, of course, General Charles de Gaulle.
Thanks for your query and please keep those letters flooding in,
Mike XX

You had To be there
‘Jokes’ told by my three-year-old son that made me laugh at the time…

Q: Why doesn’t the television work?
A: Because it doesn’t have wheels.

Q: Why did the crocodiles cross the road?
A: To eat the people.

Q: What do castles eat?
A: Castles eat trees.

HOVE FACTUALLY
MORE FACTS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT FANTABULOUS HOVE

• Frank Sinatra’s rarest album is 1959’s In A Hove Frame Of Mind. The LP, recorded in an ill-advised attempt to break into the lucrative South East of Great Britain Retirement Home market, only sold 11 copies, prompting ol’ blue eyes, in a fit of drunken pique, to arrange the assassination of everybody in Hove by mafia enforcer Salvatore “the shark” Gambini.

• Hove Library contains the only known copy of the Necronomicon in existence.

• In 1979 the space shuttle Atlantis malfunctioned during re-entry and crash landed on Medina Villas. Nobody was killed, but the mangled shuttle remains in the centre of the street as an awful warning to man not to meddle in that which does not concern him.

• Until 1990 Hove was the only town in Great Britain to be twinned with itself.