Milton Shulman

Milton Shulman
Born	1 September 1913 Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Died	24 May 2004 (aged 90) London, U.K.
Occupation	Author, critic
Spouse(s)	Drusilla Beyfus
Children	Jason Shulman Alexandra Shulman Nicola Shulman

Milton Shulman (1 September 1913 – 24 May 2004) was a Canadian author, film and theatre critic.

Shulman was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of a successful shopkeeper. His parents were born in Ukraine and were driven out of the Russian Empire by poverty and the pogroms against the Jews. Shulman's father was only 26 when he died of the flu epidemic but had already acquired three millinery shops as well as a men's haberdashery.

Shulman was educated at Harbord Collegiate, then spent four years at the University of Toronto. Although he wished to pursue a writing career, he was articled to a law firm, attending lectures at Osgoode Hall Law School for a further three years before being called to the Ontario bar just before war broke out in 1939.

After the phoney war period Shulman signed up for the Canadian army, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Canadian Armoured Corps and posted to England in June 1943. Stationed in London as a captain he was assigned to the secret operational intelligence unit MI 14b, dealing with the order of battle of the Wehrmacht's formations.

He joined Canadian Army HQ three months before D-Day as a major and by the war's end he was an intelligence officer with the First Canadian Army. While still in uniform, he interviewed many of the captured German generals in the following months and years including Gerd von Rundstedt and Kurt Meyer. As a result of these interviews he wrote the classic Second World War military history Defeat in the West, published in London by Secker & Warburg in April 1947, and by Dutton in New York in January 1948. The book remains in print in paperback.

Shulman joined the staff of the London Evening Standard in 1948 and, for over forty years, wrote about theatre, film, television and politics with sharp humour and irreverence. He was theatre critic for the Standard from 1953 until the end of 1991, and remained a weekly columnist until February 1996. He had initially become the Standard's film critic in 1948 and later became film critic for Vogue, and for 18 years he was a regular participant in BBC Radio 4's witty talk show Stop The Week.

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