Nazi Votes

David Blackbourn, 1 November 1984

The Nazi Machtergreifung 
edited by Peter Stachura.
Allen and Unwin, 191 pp., £12.50, April 1983, 0 04 943026 2
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Stormtroopers: A Social, Economic and Ideological Analysis 1929-35 
by Conan Fischer.
Allen and Unwin, 239 pp., £20, June 1983, 0 04 943028 9
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The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders 1919-1945 
by Michael Kater.
Blackwell, 415 pp., £22.50, August 1983, 0 631 13313 5
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Beating the Fascists: The German Communists and Political Violence 1929-1933 
by Eve Rosenhaft.
Cambridge, 273 pp., £24, August 1983, 9780521236386
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... of office workers and lesser officials had slightly different problems. They had been a buoyant group before 1914, but war, revolution and inflation brought new anxieties and sharpened old ones. The white collar ‘little man’ of Hans Fallada’s bestselling novel began to lose out. Differentials with manual workers were eroded, and many of the old social ...

Taking the Bosses Hostage

Joshua Kurlantzick: China goes into reverse, 26 March 2009

Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China 
by Leslie Chang.
Picador, 432 pp., £12.99, February 2009, 978 0 330 50670 0
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Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State 
by Yasheng Huang.
Cambridge, 366 pp., £15.99, November 2008, 978 0 521 89810 2
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... can’t immunise itself against the wave of protest sweeping across China as the global financial crisis batters the country’s economy, which is heavily dependent on exports to Western nations. Most Chinese economists believe the country needs to grow by at least 8 per cent each year to absorb those entering the job market, from peasants migrating to big ...

Caesar wept

Jan-Werner Müller: Trolling the Libs, 4 December 2025

... plans (this was restricted after a legal challenge by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic group). According to post-liberals in the US, liberalism only pretends to be neutral in conflicts between what John Rawls called ‘conceptions of the good’; in reality, its insistence on a single human good amounts to totalitarianism.What might a post-liberal ...

Under the Sign of the Interim

Perry Anderson, 4 January 1996

The European Rescue of the Nation-State 
by Alan Milward.
Routledge, 506 pp., £17.99, May 1994, 0 415 11133 1
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The Frontier of National Sovereignty: History and Theory 1945-1992 
by Alan Milward.
Routledge, 248 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 0 415 11784 4
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Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence 
by François Duchêne.
Norton, 278 pp., $35, January 1995, 0 393 03497 6
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... Act of the mid-Eighties, reveals the same pattern. By then, under the pressure of global economic crisis and mounting competition from the US and Japan, the political consensus had shifted, as electorates became resigned to the return of unemployment and converted to the imperatives of sound money and social deregulation. Milward does not conceal his dislike ...

It all fell apart

Abigail Green: Pogroms in Ukraine, 21 July 2022

In the Midst of Civilised Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-21 and the Onset of the Holocaust 
by Jeffrey Veidlinger.
Picador, 480 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 1 5098 6744 8
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... which suppressed Cossack and peasant uprisings, prompted the earliest large-scale Jewish refugee crisis in Eastern Europe. Many thousands of Jews were murdered, tens of thousands fled, and Ukraine’s Jewish population fell by nearly half. ‘Wherever they found the szlachta [Polish nobility], royal officials or Jews, they killed them all, sparing neither ...

Diary

Suzy Hansen: In Istanbul, 7 May 2015

... coup. This spring, the entire country lost electricity for several hours, during which a leftist group took hostage the Istanbul prosecutor investigating the death of a teenager hit on the head with a tear gas canister. (The prosecutor later died in a shoot-out.) Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has sought to expand police powers so that ...

In the Soup

David Trotter: Air Raid Panic, 9 October 2014

The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-41 
by Brett Holman.
Ashgate, 290 pp., £70, June 2014, 978 1 4094 4733 7
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... for aerial rearmament. At the end of January, he announced the formation of a new pressure group, the National League of Airmen. Within a couple of months, more than two thousand pilots had joined. The Rothermere papers, including the Daily Mail, which had a circulation of more than 1.5 million, zealously reported its activities. During the general ...

Let’s Do the Time Warp

Clair Wills: Modern Irish History, 3 July 2008

Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change c.1970-2000 
by R.F. Foster.
Penguin, 228 pp., £8.99, July 2008, 978 0 14 101765 5
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... below the poverty line. Unemployment and emigration soared in the mid-1980s, and the economic crisis went hand in hand with a conservative backlash against social liberalisation. In 1983 the target was abortion; in 1986 divorce. Until 1985 the right to contraception (won in 1979) was limited to married couples. Northern politics suffered from the ...

Hinsley’s History

Noël Annan, 1 August 1985

Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F.H. Hinsley 
edited by Richard Langhorne.
Cambridge, 329 pp., £27.50, May 1985, 0 521 26840 0
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British Intelligence and the Second World War. Vol. I: 1939-Summer 1941, Vol. II: Mid-1941-Mid-1943, Vol. III, Part I: June 1943-June 1944 
by F.H. Hinsley, E.E. Thomas, C.F.G. Ransom and R.C. Knight.
HMSO, 616 pp., £12.95, September 1979, 0 11 630933 4
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... the KGB, they all believed at the time that they were being recruited by the Comintern, the overt international Communist organisation of the inter-war years. He correctly identifies Burgess as the recruiting sergeant and equally correctly surmises that while all were convinced Communists, for Burgess (and probably for Blunt) recruitment began as a hilarious ...

The Club and the Mob

James Meek: The Shock of the News, 6 December 2018

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now 
by Alan Rusbridger.
Canongate, 464 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 1 78689 093 1
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... but most cities and towns had a daily paper of some kind, with a mix of local and national and international news, comfortably financed by cover price and advertising. During the day, on the way to work, in the workplace, in the canteen, there would be news on the radio, or continued picking over the carcass of the paper. In the evening, there would be the ...

Europe’s War

Jeremy Harding: Kosovo, 29 April 1999

... their money; a Macedonian soldier had been offered 6000 DM – roughly 2.8 to the pound – by a group of refugees in the field to let them through the security cordon. But the most painful contradiction of Blace was the one you find everywhere in emergencies: the agonising pace at which the situation worsened for the refugees – tens of thousands treading ...

A Degree of Light-Heartedness

Christopher Clark: Merkel’s Two Lives, 20 February 2025

Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021 
by Angela Merkel with Beate Baumann, translated by Alice Tetley-Paul et al.
Macmillan, 709 pp., £35, November 2024, 978 1 0350 2075 1
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... instinctively towards the fullest possible alignment with the West. The small liberal-conservative group she joined late in 1989, Democratic Awakening, soon merged with the Alliance for Germany, an electoral coalition of centre-right parties led by the GDR wing of the Christian Democratic Union, the party of the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl. Merkel ...

Newton reinvents himself

Jonathan Rée, 20 January 2011

Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist 
by Thomas Levenson.
Faber, 318 pp., £9.99, August 2010, 978 0 571 22993 2
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... than Cromwell’ played well with them. But James was prone to ominous forebodings, and when the crisis came his courage deserted him. On 18 December he allowed himself to be shuffled off to Rochester by a band of Dutch guards, leaving William to take over his palaces and prerogatives at the head of a foreign army. Crowds filled the streets, as they had ...

Now to Stride into the Sunlight

Ian Jack: The Brexiters, 15 June 2017

What Next: How to Get the Best from Brexit 
by Daniel Hannan.
Head of Zeus, 298 pp., £9.99, November 2016, 978 1 78669 193 4
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The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign 
by Arron Banks.
Biteback, 354 pp., £9.99, June 2017, 978 1 78590 205 5
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All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 688 pp., £9.99, June 2017, 978 0 00 821517 0
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... my lifetime has had such an invasive and lowering personal effect – in memory, the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went almost before you could say ‘Armageddon’. The visionary glint in the victors’ eyes just adds to our losers’ despair. ‘After 43 years, we have pushed the door ajar,’ the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan writes dreamily. ‘A rectangle of ...

After George W. Bush, the Deluge

Murray Sayle: Back to the Carboniferous, 21 June 2001

Draft Report of the 17th Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Nairobi, 4-6 April 2001 
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Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability 
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The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming 
by David Victor.
Princeton, 192 pp., £12.95, April 2001, 0 691 08870 5
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Managing the Planet: The Politics of the New Millennium 
by Norman Moss.
Earthscan, 232 pp., £16.99, September 2000, 1 85383 644 3
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... have changed since the campaign … We’ – meaning Americans – ‘are now in an energy crisis.’ A few days later Vice-President Dick Cheney, like Bush a Texas oil industry veteran, announced a new American policy of generating more energy, rather than conserving existing supplies, and predicted that the US would need between 1300 and 1900 new ...