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“... in the end by Thomas the tortoise. From the beginning, Thomas rages privately against the Third Reich. Germany is ‘that wretched sinkhole’; Hitler is ‘the scoundrel’ or ‘the pig’. Both brothers speculate endlessly about the collapse of the ‘rogue regime’, seizing on every scrap of evidence that National Socialism was losing popular support ...”

“... and served for the best part of a decade. His most important act was the negotiation of the Reich Concordat with Hitler’s new government in July 1933. The Catholic Church agreed to require priests in Germany to swear an oath of allegiance to the president and to refrain from political activity; its most important means of political representation, the ...”

“... culture after the victorious conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War and the proclamation of the Reich at Versailles in January 1871. These Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, written while Nietzsche was Professor of Classical Philology at Basle, are here translated as Unmodern Observations by different hands, under the editorship of Professor William Arrowsmith ...”

“... comprised the widowed Queen Mary, her four surviving sons and one daughter. Edward, known as David, was his mother’s favourite. The heir, the best-looking, the most popular, he was spoilt beyond redemption. The second son, the Duke of York who became the reluctant king, was the self-effacing naval officer hampered by an acute stammer. Of the younger ...”

“... Archbishop Laud and the University of Oxford is much in Trevor-Roper’s spirit. I greatly enjoyed David S. Katz on the problem, much debated in 17th century England, of what language Adam spoke. After some false starts with Egyptian and ‘the language of Canaan’, Hebrew won the contest: hence the increase in Hebrew studies during the century. Republicans ...”

“... of an alliance between Social Democrats and liberals, reacting against the crimes of the Third Reich, and conservatives concerned by the continuing application of capital punishment to war criminals. There were many efforts to overturn this provision – Konrad Adenauer was still trying in 1962 – but abolition gradually acquired legitimacy. Since the ...”

“... of the family psychodrama. Wilhelm, sounding like a cut-price Hamlet, cursed the ruin of the Reich ‘by an English princess who is my mother’. And Queen Victoria, sounding exactly like herself, commented on reports of his filial ingratitude: ‘How wicked & horrid.’ On 11 June, Friedrich made his last diary entry: ‘I must get well again, I have so ...”

“... A novel is different. A novel is a bicycle, and readers must pedal. The recent film version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas gave a vivid demonstration, almost a bullet-point presentation, of how differently narrative works in the two media. The book presents the reader with a number of openings, which break off without explanation. Readers who persevere ...”

“... up roughly one in five inhabitants of a devastated territory less than half the size of the prewar Reich. While some of them remained isolated, depressed and poor for the rest of their lives, others had brought with them as their only possession a determination to fit in and succeed in what was for them in many ways a foreign country. Their arrival disrupted ...”

“... in Eastern Europe, he was then an Oxford graduate student based in Berlin. Working on the Third Reich, he became interested in the mainsprings of collaboration and resistance as they presented themselves ‘in real time’, in the GDR, where he lived for 18 months. He was eventually banned from the country after publishing a critical account of society ...”

“... years’. Despite all this, he produced his greatest works in exile: Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, as well as the Svendborg Poems, which in Parker’s view ‘refashioned the idiom of German poetry’. To these can be added anti-fascist ...”

“... of Africa. The tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, though each probably caused more deaths than the Third Reich, did not aim at the total physical extermination of entire populations. The same can be said of the deportation and deaths of one and a half million Ottoman Armenians in the First World War, which in other respects is the nearest parallel we have to the ...”

“... A crude version of this argument can be found in William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a relentless piece of Nazi pedigree-hunting with some claim to be considered, despite strong competition, the worst book ever written on German history. Others have argued more subtly for the role played by naive, unworldly German intellectuals from the ...”

“... imposed by the EU and the IMF on Greece in the 2010s sparked protests against a German ‘Fourth Reich’. Today, poorer countries, overwhelmed by global inflation and debt crises triggered by Washington’s interest-rate hikes, continue to protest that the economic system is rigged against them. The present moment is in some ways reminiscent of the ...”

“... on him. The front cover of Tynan’s Letters, published in 1994, features a portrait taken by David Bailey, itself a sign of pop status. The front cover of The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan is a close up of its subject inhaling, eyes shut, fingers splayed; its back cover, three shots of him in different stages of smoking – an action-sequence of sorts. How ...”