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“... actual as well as imaginary villains. Kerr is much more at home among the ruins than he was in the Reich. Where he still leaves me disappointed – surprisingly – is in the basic disciplines of his trade.   He was a well-built man, with thick dark eyebrows and a large, flourishing moustache: it looked like some rare species of marten that had escaped on ...”

“... which I had mistakenly supposed to be in honour of a thoroughgoing Tory figure. The first is by Robert Blake, himself an almost official Tory historian. Once more, ‘the missing telegrams’ concerning Chamberlain’s pre-knowledge of the Jameson Raid are displayed and the answer is decisive: Chamberlain knew and persistently deceived the House of ...”

“... some of Hitler’s satraps and by Allied practitioners of disinformation. Astrology and the Third Reich is not a well-planned book. It tries to get too much in, as Howe himself confesses. But as a consequence it includes a great deal of miscellaneous information otherwise not easily encountered. He shows how various are the uses to which astrology has been ...”

“... Christmases go, 1936 at Sandringham must have been one of the worst. The next year, as the Third Reich’s ambitions gathered momentum and there was talk across Europe of war, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor went on a tour of Germany. It was a scheme cooked up by one of their rich but shady friends, Charles Bedaux. The inventor of the Bedaux System, a form ...”

“... of principalities must melt into one (even in Bismarck’s time, after the overarching German Reich was proclaimed in 1871, 25 kingdoms, principalities and statelets survived, along with their rulers). Real Germany would also require modernity. But did that imply a liberal-democratic constitution based on popular sovereignty? Or an autocracy, crowned or ...”

“... demystify the discourse which has informed post-Victorian accounts about sex, whether therapeutic (Reich), scholarly (Bloch) or polemical (Marcuse). Such histories were traditionally cast in a progressive, Whiggish, emancipatory framework, presupposing a dialectics of drives, repression and liberation. Sex was self-evidently a good thing, nature’s path to ...”

“... troubled mind. Or so it is said in this compendium of stories, freshly unearthed by the Arabists Robert Irwin and Malcolm Lyons, who also worked on the recent Penguin three-volume Arabian Nights.* In Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, the storytellers are mostly described as learned sheikhs with vast libraries and, in contrast to the lectrices ...”

“... the main body of the Volk. But it was also about reuniting the region’s coal and iron ore with a Reich rich in human energy but poor in the other sort. Wotan’s Forge might have been the powerhouse of Europe, but it was chronically short of raw materials. The quest for Lebensraum was always a quest for Grabensraum too. Living space would bring digging space ...”

“... in fraternal embrace waving a swastika flag, themselves embraced by the script ‘Ein Volk – Ein Reich – Ein Führer’. There were to be no more Austrian stamps until November 1945.It’s impossible to know whether Donald understood the reason for the sudden disappearance of stamps from the country previously known as Österreich. (I’m sure he ...”

“... and became the figurehead of De Gaulle’s movement against the Vichy regime and the Third Reich. Sharing a history of warfare, death, occupation and deliverance, Belgian Catholics gladly adopted the French heroine. Les Dames de Marie occupied a vast Gothic pile, decorated throughout in polished marble with busy polychrome wall paintings recalling ...”

“... is to be held and done in common; nobody is to be unwillingly obeyed; in the sunlight of what Robert Burns called ‘social love’, human beings return to their true nature of unselfish sharing. It’s a transfiguration first seen in the French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our ...”

“... Plato’s Republic was, after all, the most widely read work on political theory in the Third Reich. There is, however, one final ironic twist to that conjunction, which is brought out by Robert Proctor’s remarkable study of The Nazi War on Cancer. Proctor, the author of an earlier account of the Nazi racial hygiene ...”

“... warriors who were lured into barbarity by visions of a Cossack homeland in the Thousand-Year Reich. Krasnov is the ataman of these forlorn Italian Cossacks: There is a stringent logic in the fact that Krasnov threw himself into the arms of fascism, because fascism is above all this inability to discern poetry in the hard and good prose of everyday, this ...”

“... Only in the last few years, with Swansong 1945, a collective diary of the last days of the Third Reich, quickly followed by his masterpiece, the novel All for Nothing, has the English-speaking world opened up to him. The first came out here in 2014, the second in 2015, in each case nearly ten years after their appearance in German. Translations can be slow ...”

“... as the anthropologist Eugen Fischer, later a leading ‘racial hygienist’ under the Third Reich, descended on the town of Rehoboth to study its mixed-race inhabitants (he called them the ‘Rehoboth bastards’). He and his colleagues obtained skulls for craniometric studies of different races; up to 300 of them eventually found their way to ...”