Mark Mazower is director of the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, which has just opened in Paris. His books include Dark Continent: Europe’s 20th Century.
In 1989, the Soviet historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, well known to readers of the LRB, was on a plane when the passenger next to her struck up a conversation. She’d been watching him write a letter in French and on that basis assumed he was French. Given her accent he thought at first that she was Danish. Later it seemed appropriate to her that their first conversation had been about...
When the Greek revolution began in earnest has never been in doubt. When it ended – in 1832, with the recognition of the Kingdom of Greece; or in 1843, with the bloodless revolution against King Otto...
Mark Mazower has written many elegant but gloomy books about the unending capacity of the Europeans to destroy one another. His new book is elegant, perceptive, stimulating and erudite. It deals...
As a young man, Adolf Hitler became a devotee of the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, and spent much of his meagre income on tickets for performances of Lohengrin and other pseudo-medieval...
Back in the now remote summer of 1990, when we were still celebrating the birth of a ‘new Europe’, a book was published simultaneously in several European languages. Written by...
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