Barbara Winton

Five stars for the man, three stars for his story, which didn't need to be told. The late Mr Winton - this is a re-release of an old biography, to cash in on the recent biopic - was involved in the brave and selfless rescue of 600 Czechoslovakian children in 1939, before the outbreak of World War Two.

He was an intelligent, middle class man born to German-Jewish parents and learned to speak German and French fluently while training to work in banking. For a year leading up to the war he assisted Doreen Warriner and others already in Prague in compiling a list of Jewish children under threat from the Nazis and returned to the UK to find foster homes for them. After the war, he worked for the International Refugee Organisation, gathering the looted possessions of thousands of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, from clocks to gold teeth, to be melted down and redistributed as compensation to refugees.

I'm not downplaying his achievements by any means, but the rest of his life is only of interest to his family, notably his daughter Barbara who wrote this plodding account. I was going to watch the film, which presumably turns Winton and his modest role into a second Oskar Schindler, but the bland and one note Johnny Flynn has been miscast yet again, so I turned to the source material instead. For anyone else who wants to learn more about the real man, stick to Wikipedia and the clip from That's Life! instead.… (plus d'informations)