“... he wrote, ‘needed private carriers to help them struggle along under great loads.’ David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy We almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his arm. One was the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and ...”

“... where they dine with his new colleagues from Brandeis. Sontag has given birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or ...”

“... from Tocqueville-in particular, that it was not enough to repent of the misdeeds of the Third Reich, that democracy needed ‘the antagonism of opinions’ more than the concerted mouthing of Cold War platitudes which conservative politicians preferred. In post-war France, Raymond Aron saw Tocqueville as the great counter-weight to Marx. ...”

“... who had by then returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind ...”

“... pacifistic idealists. No such excuse can be made for Channon, whose susceptibility to the Third Reich went beyond naive delusion. Or, as the travel writer Robert Byron said to him, ‘the trouble with you, Chips, is that you put your adopted class before your adopted country.’After Chamberlain gave his guarantee to Poland in March 1939, and even after the ...”

“... in countries in which people are willing to stake their lives for liberty and honour. That your Reich and its leaders have many admirers among our youth is a well-known fact.’ Keogh writes that Bewley’s observations were ‘purely personal’ and ‘a source of professional embarrassment to de Valera, who was Minister for External ...”

“... but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity ...”

“... raced to meet the expectations of their followers. (Unlike most governments, as the historian David Renton points out, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany became more radical once in office.) Fascism involves a form of collective behaviour that seems unaccountable. Many in the interwar period were slow to recognise the danger it posed, seeing fascism ...”

“... and in books and articles by writers with dubious credentials, such as Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the State’, written by one of the NRA’s lawyers – the argument is made, over and over again, that gun registries are the golden thread connecting all genocidaires: ‘Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Idi ...”

“... saw a poster facing me. Executed in yellow and black, it was a combined logo featuring the Star of David, the Islamic star and crescent, the Roman Catholic cross and the more elaborate cruciform of the Serbian and Bosnian Orthodox. Gens una summus,read the superscription. ‘We are one people’. Here, rendered in iconographic terms, was the defiant remnant of ...”

“... context, first applied to politicians, intellectuals and journalists of the left: men like Robert Reich, James Fallows, Lester Thurow, Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, all of whom saw themselves in opposition to an older labour-liberal establishment that was sceptical of the market and friendly to the state. The ‘fracture of the social’ that followed, Rodgers ...”

“... had planted on seized Polish farms – that furious local populations were flogging westwards. The Reich these columns entered was already chock-full of people out of place: prisoners of war, forced labourers, orphaned and homeless children and refugees of all kinds. Jewish survivors emerged too, some tens of thousands liberated from the camps joined by ...”

“... a white sash. (The Junker grandees in the von Werner painting of the proclamation of the Second Reich in 1871 were dressed rather like this.) The three look no older than their twenty years. They stand with an easy weightiness on a low flight of stairs bounded by an iron railing. One of them, thin and with perhaps a certain aristocratic insouciance, stands ...”

“... of Surrealism during the war years (he also launched a journal there, with Duchamp, Ernst and David Hare, called VVV). And though Bretonian Surrealism was opposed to abstraction, it helped American artists like Jackson Pollock develop an automatist gesturalism that was more expressive of the unconscious than any Surrealist dreamscape. Such was also its ...”

“... At 2.15 p.m. on the afternoon of 10 June 1944, a company of the 2nd SS panzer division, ‘Das Reich’, entered the small French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, herded most of its population, swollen by refugees, into barns and garages, the women and children into the church, then killed them with firearms and grenades. The panzergrenadiers had been informed ...”