The Greatest Warlord

David Blackbourn: Hitler, 22 March 2001

Hitler, 1936-45: Nemesis 
byIan Kershaw.
Allen Lane, 1115 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 7139 9229 8
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... the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success.’ Others were equally impressed by the Department of Hitler Studies. ‘You’ve established a wonderful thing here with Hitler,’ says Gladney’s colleague Murray Siskind, visiting lecturer in living icons. ‘I marvel at the effort. It was masterful, shrewd and stunningly ...

More Reconciliation than Truth

David Blackbourn: Germany’s Postwar Amnesties, 31 October 2002

Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration 
byNorbert Frei, translated byJoel Golb.
Columbia, 479 pp., £24.50, September 2002, 0 231 11882 1
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... collective German repression of painful memories after 1945. Norbert Frei pursues the same theme by examining political debates in the early years of the Federal Republic. His book originally appeared in 1996 with the title Vergangenheitspolitik (the ‘politics of the past’, or ‘policy for the past’), a term that has since entered general use in ...

Homeric Cheese v. Technophiliac Relish

David Cooper: GM food, 18 May 2000

... and food supplements, while contributing to the production of cheese and other foods. They will be used to prevent frost damage to strawberries. Crops will be created to resist pests and diseases ... Food products from wonder fish, cattle and poultry will also find their way onto the grocer’s shelves.’ These might ...

The Prodigal Century

David Blackbourn: Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Centuryby John McNeill, 7 June 2001

Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century 
byJohn McNeill.
Penguin, 448 pp., £8.99, August 2001, 0 14 029509 7
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... Nader, they would have voted overwhelmingly for Gore (or not at all). It was thus voting decisions by the most environmentally conscious part of the electorate that put one former oilman in the White House, made another Vice-President, and led to a Cabinet that generously represents the interests of mining, logging, chemicals and agribusiness. However true it ...

Love is always young and happy

David Coward: Molière, 5 April 2001

Molière: A Theatrical Life 
byVirginia Scott.
Cambridge, 333 pp., £35, October 2000, 0 521 78281 3
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... about 1820, so the story goes, a peasant appeared at the Bibliothèque Nationale with a cart drawn by a mule. In the cart, he said, were ‘tous les papiers de Molière’ and they were for sale. But the Library was closed and the concierge told him to come back another day. He never did and ‘Molière’s papers’ were doubtless offloaded as wrapping for ...

‘Monocled Baron Charged’

David Coward: Vichy’s commissioner for Jewish affairs, 8 June 2006

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland 
byCarmen Callil.
Cape, 614 pp., £20, April 2006, 0 224 07810 0
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... stunning documentary of life in Clermont-Ferrand during World War Two. Her attention was caught by a clip showing Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Final Solution and Himmler’s deputy, shaking hands in May 1942 with Darquier de Pellepoix, charged by the German occupiers and the Vichy government with delivering ...

Twilight Approaches

David A. Bell: Salon Life in France, 11 May 2006

The Age of Conversation 
byBenedetta Craveri, translated byTeresa Waugh.
NYRB, 488 pp., £17.99, October 2005, 1 59017 141 1
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... as follows. Sometime in the 17th century, the country’s proud noble caste was humbled and tamed by imperious ministers and kings. Where once it had swayed the destinies of Europe, it was now confined to the gilded cage of the royal court, and the elegant salons of Paris. Others might have raged against this fate, but the French nobility adapted to it. Its ...

Looking back at the rubble

David Simpson: War and the Built Environment, 25 May 2006

The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War 
byRobert Bevan.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £19.95, January 2006, 1 86189 205 5
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... Thucydides claimed that posterity should not judge the power and dignity of states by their architectural remains. The power of Sparta over much of the Peloponnese and beyond could not have been inferred from an inspection of its built culture – a collection of villages with no grandiose temples or monuments. Conversely, the importance of Athens would be overestimated by anyone in later times who based their opinion on the spectacle of its architectural remains ...

Short Cuts

David Todd: Bonapartism, Gaullism, Macronism, 1 August 2024

... An hour earlier, exit polls had shown that his party, Renaissance, and its allies had been routed by the far right in elections for the European Parliament. The dissolution wasn’t a coup in the ordinary sense of the term, though Macron played fast and loose with constitutional conventions (the speaker of the Senate, who ought to have been consulted, was ...

The Killing of Blair Peach

David Renton, 22 May 2014

... to protect the NF’s right of assembly, 700 protesters were arrested, 345 of whom would be charged, 97 police officers and 64 members of the public were reported to have been injured, and one demonstrator, Blair Peach, was killed. Blair Peach’s funeral, 13 June 1979. On 27 May the following year, an inquest jury reached a verdict in ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... Sexists, racists and buffoons … misogynistic shitheads everywhere … If he does manage to be a douche nozzle without breaking the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice President-elect Mike Pence by the cast of Hamilton after he attended a ...

The Ultimate Socket

David Trotter: On Sylvia Townsend Warner, 23 June 2022

Lolly Willowes 
bySylvia Townsend Warner.
Penguin, 161 pp., £9.99, October 2020, 978 0 241 45488 6
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Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life 
byFrances Bingham.
Handheld Press, 344 pp., £15.99, May 2021, 978 1 912766 40 6
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... it came to libido, others might prefer to ‘receive’ and ‘retain’ rather than to discharge. By Ackland’s account, Warner belonged to the second category. The lovers (Warner was then 37, Ackland 24) knew that they had embarked on a kind of relationship which, if not exactly unheard of, would take some figuring out. The emotional generosity and sense of ...

At the Opium Factory

David Simpson: Amitav Ghosh, 22 October 2009

Sea of Poppies 
byAmitav Ghosh.
Murray, 544 pp., £7.99, April 2009, 978 0 7195 6897 8
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... more tropical in its associations. If the city is where readers of these books are most often to be found, the books themselves tend to be set in the village and the jungle, as in the exemplary magical-realist ‘world novel’, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which was written in one ...

Further, Father, Further!

David A. Bell: ‘The Wanton Jesuit’, 17 November 2016

The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint: A Tale of Sex, Religion and Politics in 18th-Century France 
byMita Choudhury.
Penn State, 234 pp., £43.95, December 2015, 978 0 271 07081 0
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... as far afield as Boston, Massachusetts promised to carry as much about the affair ‘as is fit to be printed’. Hundreds of songs and poems appeared, including, in London, the hilariously awful ‘Spiritual Amours’. Its author, a certain ‘Jeremy Jingle’, had no love lost for That compound of a goatish Lecher And a most edifying Preacher … To him ...

Solid and Fleeting

David Sylvester, 17 December 1992

... on the walls. Its flaws as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or ...