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“... Last year was the year of commemorative news. The media discovered that the public was old enough to be as interested in events from fifty years ago as it is in today’s news. Of these events the one that took up the most time and space was the Munich agreement of 1938, although it was subsequently driven off the centre pages by Kristallnacht and the Jewish pogroms in Germany ...”

“... With the completion of Suicidal Europe, 1870-1933, Léon Poliakov has brought his history of anti-semitism to the start of the Nazi regime.* The whole work has taken him at least fourteen years. Beginning this volume with what looked likely to be the gradually advancing triumph of the enlightened attitudes to Jewry proclaimed by 18th-century philosophy, he has instead had to trace the hostile reactions to Jewish emancipation in the major countries and stands at the end peering forward into the dark abysses of human behaviour in the 1930s ...”

“... Whose is the second most valuable signature on the American autograph market after that of Abraham Lincoln? Which is the better investment, the penis of Napoleon or the handwriting of Hitler? The answer in both cases is Adolf Hitler. If you can buy them, Nazi memorabilia are your best hedge against inflation. Their value increases by about 20 per cent a year ...”

“... In the early summer of 1931, as the storm centre of the century’s worst depression roared back towards a Germany where already 4.5 million people were out of work, the Nazi Party for the first time faced the fact that it might be elected to government. ‘Finance capitalism’, which they had been lambasting for 12 years, had got the country into just the mess they had predicted ...”

“... When in 1975 Lucy Dawidowicz published The War against the Jews she started the swell of one of those waves of intellectual hysteria which betray the yearning for conformity among American historians. The intention of the book was entirely justified and laudable. In her judgment, historians had not given the massacre of the European Jews the importance it deserved as a central event in the history of our century ...”

“... In one week in July 1947, Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, walked out of discussions with his British and French counterparts about the American offer of Marshall Aid; Europe was divided, east and west; and the seven surviving major Nazi war criminals who had been tried and condemned by the victorious allies at Nuremberg were moved, the subject of a special four-power agreement, into Spandau Prison in what was to become West Berlin ...”

“... versions, not all of them concordant. By far the most powerful and distinctive is the work of Alan Milward. There is some irony in the fact that the country which has contributed least to European integration should have produced the historian who has illuminated it most. No other scholar within the Union approaches the combination of archival ...”

“... Brexotics remain deaf to the rather more subtle thesis advanced by that great contrarian Alan Milward in The European Rescue of the Nation-State (1992): that the underlying purpose of the drive for European union was to retrieve the nation-state from its ignominy and demoralisation after two catastrophic world wars, and to anchor it in a network ...”

“... nations. And that brings me to my second contentious, revisionist idea. It comes from the late Alan Milward, iconoclast of recent European history. His book The European Rescue of the Nation-State (1992) knocked the wheels off conventional accounts of how the European Community arose, and it is still angrily argued over. ...”

“... and new homes springing up along the bypasses, but that is not how those years were remembered. As Alan Milward put it – and this is Hennessy’s underlying theme throughout – ‘the 1930s were now seen as wasted years. To ensure that there should be no further wasted years had become a historical imperative brooking no question, a ...”

“... Plan’ to guarantee ‘the common security of the whole world’. Well after the 1980s, when Alan Milward dismantled the myth that the Marshall Plan had injected capital into a continent that lacked it, rather than unlocking capital already there and speeding up a recovery already underway, liberal historians – mostly American – continued to ...”

“... objectives and domestic aspirations of the kind that the principal historian of the Community, Alan Milward, would banish from the record of earlier integration. How much does it matter to ordinary French voters whether or not Germany is diplomatically master of the continent again? Are not the creation of jobs and growth of incomes issues closer to ...”

“... from nation-state to member state come about? After the Second World War – Bickerton follows Alan Milward and John Ruggie here – a class compromise between capital and labour was reached in Western Europe, taking the organisational form of a corporatist state committed to full employment, a range of welfare services and a set of transfer ...”