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“... With the collapse of Communism and the disorientation of the Marxist Left, a poignant revaluation has overtaken the history of the European Resistance in World War Two. The gradual disappearance of the survivors would in itself have led to a dissipation of the Resistance’s sacred aura; but politics as well as demography is now at work. Of course, the history of the Resistance has always been especially vulnerable: for four decades in Italy it served to legitimate the vision of a Left that could embrace Communists and non-Communists alike; in France it justified the creation of the Gaullist Republic; in Yugoslavia it helped for forty years to hold together a precarious nationhood; in the Soviet bloc it furnished credentials for the Communist Parties that monopolised power after Hitler’s armies had been cleared out ...”

“... it makes no sense to discuss whether or not it might have occurred had Peter the Great rather than Charles XII lost at Poltava. Too many events have intervened to establish any plausible chains of causation. On the other hand, the price of the counter-factual closer to the event is that it will fail to illuminate the broad spectrum of causative factors and put ...”

“... The reasons were many, though their respective weight remains a matter of speculation. Perhaps, as Charles Maier suggests in the few passages of his book devoted to Soviet thought processes, they had made the strategic choice of opening up to a Europe in which they attributed the key role to Bonn, thereby relegating East Germany to the status of an ...”

“... If ‘history’s little joke’ offers one important answer for the state of American politics, Charles Maier finds another, in the dynamics of empire. In Among Empires, Maier asks whether the US is an empire and answers with a yes and a no. It is certainly a great power grappling with the seductions of empire. And ...”

“... doctrinaire Marxism is the last obstacle on Germany’s road to democracy. An American scholar, Charles Maier of Harvard, has followed the historians’ dispute and written a commentary on it. The nonce word in his title raises expectations of originality which the book doesn’t fulfil. His summaries of the main contributions are useful, fair, and ...”

“... Attlee, who was faced with the chiefs’ threatened resignation at the beginning of 1947; and Charles Maier on the dominant role of the United States and the dollar in organising the ...”

“... transfer of money abroad. Ken Saro-Wiwa was hardly a saint. In This House Has Fallen, Karl Maier, an American journalist who has spent many years reporting from all over Africa, gives Saro-Wiwa an entire chapter. Unlike Ken Wiwa, he delves deeply into the activities of Shell, and gives an instance in 1990 when the company called in the dreaded Mobile ...”

“... and little is known about its chief apologists: Johann Valentin Andreae, Adam Haselmayer, Michael Maier et al. But whatever their provenance and purpose, the manifestos exemplify this conjunction of occultist aspirations with the kind of utopian, pacifist, New Age politics later to be heard in the more militant quarters of the Civil War. This potentially ...”

“... they offered the kind of Hollywood freeze-frame Woody Allen spoofed in Take the Money and Run: Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the legendary mobster Lansky helped spring from an American prison long before he finished his 30-to-50-year sentence for running a prostitution racket; Vito Genovese, a famous killer; Albert Anastasia, head of the so-called ...”