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“... It has suddenly become fashionable to sneer at the memory of the Second World War. The national press has been home to editorials and opinion columns archly condemning the anniversary as so much media junketing, as one long yawn. It is true that a great many people have jumped late and unceremoniously on the bandwagon, trivialising the past, capitalising cheaply on recollection ...”

“... Albert Speer, Hitler’s pet architect and wartime armaments supremo, has always been regarded differently from the rest of Hitler’s henchmen. The ragbag of embittered veterans and political terrorists, shadows of Hitler himself, had little in common with the respectable and prosperous Speer, too young to have fought in the First World War, too fastidious and bourgeois for street-brawl politics ...”

“... On the German side, the history of the last two years of the Second World War is a history of retreating. Occasionally, the retreats were punctuated by large-scale counter-attacks – Rommel at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia; Operation Autumn Mist in December 1944 – but whether they liked it or not, the German forces generally had to move backwards ...”

“... Americans against German cities. Americans come last chronologically, and also in intent, for as Richard Overy explains succinctly and well, the US saw the bombing of cities as a last resort and not the very first aim, as it was for Bomber Command. However, from Appendix 2 of the Hamburg police president’s report, which isn’t reproduced in the ...”

“... are essentially not about the past, but about the retrospect to it of some subsequent present. Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age demonstrates another, and less indirect, approach to the emotional texture of the past: the difficult excavation of contemporary popular reactions to what was happening in and around people’s lives – one might call it the ...”

“... Certainly the history of what actually happened in the war has only just begun to be written. Richard Overy’s impressive overview is a reminder of how poorly the English-speaking reader has been served with histories of the war on the Eastern Front. Although it was of a far greater order of magnitude than the war in the West (Hitler sent 228 ...”

“... of other historians have written recently, and more perceptively, about this same topic, from Richard Overy in The Dictators to Robert Gellately in Lenin, Stalin and Hitler – some, like Norman Davies in Europe at War 1939-45, from a similar perspective to Snyder’s own. Despite the widespread misapplication of Hitler’s statement about the ...”

“... seem to have been both immediate and final, like the effects in his own books. In 1956 he reminded Richard Usborne, author of Clubland Heroes, of the source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that ...”

“... extinction. Back in 1975, Spens replaced Peter Townsend as editor of Studio International with Richard Cork. Townsend went on to found Art Monthly in 1976 with Jack and Nell Wendler. Under Townsend, James Faure-Walker had been a contributor to Studio International. Cork made his copy less welcome and Faure-Walker and others set up Artscribe. Eventually ...”

“... state’ has been extensively studied from a variety of angles, most recently in Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939-45, which includes an authoritative account of the evolution into doctrine of the belief that strategic bombing defined the purpose of the modern air force as an instrument capable of transforming warfare. ...”

“... and Greggs. One evening I drove down a dark country lane on the edge of Wyberton to the home of Richard Austin, who led the Bypass Independents to victory in 2007. He’s in his eighties now. His wife, Alison, is also involved in local politics as an independent. She would have chaired the 2017 meeting that rubber-stamped the start of housebuilding on the ...”