“... fulfil. His summaries of the main contributions are useful, fair, and almost as lengthy as Piper Verlag’s Historikerstreit, on which he draws. He shows how the attempt by the ‘revisionists’ to ‘relativise’ the Final Solution has become part of a concerted effort to provide the country with a ‘usable past’. He has buttressed the whole ...”

“... of the proper ascription of credit, opting for the showy (e.g. Lord Lovat’s arrival with his piper) rather than the death-defying slog that preceded it. This youthful book is both magnanimous and fair but later histories and memoirs were not so understanding and there would be much hoovering up of credit not least by Montgomery himself. It was this ...”

“... a gross overestimation of the likely casualties of German bombing raids, was called Operation Pied Piper, and it plays a central part in Evelyn Waugh’s seriocomic novel of the Phoney War, Put Out More Flags.A photograph from the period, taken in Le Mans, nicely catches the mood. Two teams are playing football. One side (clearly the Brits) is clad in ...”

“... one would expect from any collection of pictures, except for the jarring and very public Star of David which feels eerily as if it had invaded the private space of the pictures without its bearers having noticed. There were 1536 such pictures in the first, 1994 French edition; 1834 in the 1995 edition; another 497 in a January 1996 supplement; and a further ...”

“... as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The Eurozone’s one-time guerrilla ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”