Neal Ascherson

Norman Lewis​ wrote about himself that ‘travel came before writing. There was a time when I felt that all I wanted from life was to be allowed to remain a perpetual spectator of changing scenes.’ Luckily for us, his broadening skill as a writer caught up with his lust for those ‘changing scenes’.

The trial of Marshal Pétain began on 23 July 1945 and lasted until 15 August. The small Paris courtroom was crowded with lawyers, jurors and journalists sweating in the suffocating heat. The marshal, now a deaf and sometimes wandering old gentleman of 89, had returned voluntarily from Germany – the retreating Nazis had taken him along with them in the last weeks of the war. Other senior members of his Vichy government thought he was mad to go back.

To the end of his life, Claud Cockburn stuck to two core beliefs. The first was his instinctive scepticism and cynicism about all who hold authority. But it was his second core belief that really drove his journalism, that ‘decision-makers were weaker, more incompetent, more divided, more self-destructively corrupt than they liked people to understand and hence more vulnerable to journalistic attack and exposure.’

Myopic and flattering as their take on empire history has been, the Brits never drugged themselves into supposing that the millions out there loved them and longed to be British. Perhaps this was because ‘our empire’ was presented as a glowing abstraction, floating above the tangible reality of one’s own country.

It would be decades before younger Germans emerged from the national solipsism of their parents and recognised the suffering wreaked by German fascism on other peoples. When they did so, not least through moral repugnance at the creation of the West German army and through the appearance of active ‘atonement’ movements, the way opened to wider empathies. ‘By the 1990s, German responsibility for the Holocaust had become a civil religion that defined national identity.’