Richard J. Evans

Richard J. Evans is Regius Professor Emeritus of History at Cambridge and a former president of Wolfson College. He is the author of numerous books, including The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History and a three-volume history of the Third Reich.

Letter

Noisomeness

16 July 2020

Keith Thomas’s essay reminds me of an exchange I had with an ancient porter at my Oxford college in the late 1960s. He had been there since before the First World War and liked to reminisce about ‘the old days’. ‘What’s the main difference between the old days and now?’ I once asked him. ‘Well, sir,’ he replied, after some thought, ‘in the old days the young gentlemen used to change...
Letter

Written into History

22 January 2015

Richard Henry Holland takes me to task for calling the leaders and members of the Confessing Church ‘biblical fundamentalists’, but that is precisely what they were: they regarded the Bible as God’s revelation to humankind and rejected the Nazi-inspired German Christians’ repudiation of the Old Testament as a ‘Jewish’ book (Letters, 5 March). He points out that the White Rose Movement,...
Letter
Richard J. Evans writes: Benjamin Carter Hett’s letter contains the same non sequiturs and illogicalities as his book. As far as the forensic evidence is concerned: of course ‘experts’ consulted by those peddling the theory that there was a conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag in 1933 will oblige by providing the answers they think are being sought. ‘Expert’ reports from the present day...
Letter

The Logic of Nuremberg

7 November 2013

Tony Simpson is right in the general point he makes about the German Penal Code and its attitude to homosexuals, but wrong in some of the details (Letters, 5 December). The Weimar Republic did not repeal Paragraph 175, which continued to outlaw homosexual acts between men involving penetration. The Nazis amended it in 1935 to cover any kind of ‘lewd’ homosexual act. Under this law, offenders were...
Letter
Richard J. Evans writes: In the weird, ideologically deformed parallel universe inhabited by Messrs Gove, Schama and Ferguson, and among your respondents in this issue and the previous one, Lang, McGovern, Arends and Tombs, history in our schools is in a state of terminal decline, facts have more or less disappeared from the curriculum, the teaching of history has abandoned the long view in favour...

Was Eric Hobsbawm interested in himself? Not, I think, so very much. He had a more than healthy ego and enough self-knowledge to admit it, but all his curiosity was turned outward.

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Echoes from the Far Side: The European Age

James Sheehan, 19 October 2017

Max Weber​ defined power as ‘the ability of an individual or group to achieve their own goals or aims when others are trying to prevent them from realising them’. The pursuit of...

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Richard Evans’s history of the Third Reich – it will be completed by a third volume covering the war – is an invaluable work of synthesis. The mass of specialist studies we now...

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Laid Down by Ranke: defending history

Peter Ghosh, 15 October 1998

Richard Evans hopes that this book will take the place of E.H. Carr’s What is History? and G.R. Elton’s The Practice of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as...

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Axeman as Ballroom Dancer

David Blackbourn, 17 July 1997

In future times people will look back on the death penalty as a piece of barbarity just as we now look back on torture.’ These confident words were spoken by a member of the 1848 Frankfurt...

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Germans and the German Past

J.P. Stern, 21 December 1989

The ‘white years’ of German history – the period between the end of the war and Adenauer’s first government of 1949 – were notable for two blank spaces in the...

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Disease and the Marketplace

Roy Porter, 26 November 1987

In mid-August 1892, Hamburg was basking in a heatwave. Workers splashed around in the River Elbe, which reached an almost unprecedented 70°F. Then people started to go down with intestinal...

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