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“... now I live in Washington and I see the old Rhodes Class of those years going about its business: Robert Reich running the Labour Department and Strobe Talbott managing US-Russian relations from Foggy Bottom and Ira Magaziner trying to recover from his moment as person-in-charge of Bill and Hillary’s health care ‘reform’.When I want to recall those ...”

“... term, Germans have made a good job of confronting the criminal, genocidal character of the Third Reich. Historical writing, schoolbooks, literary works, public and political debate all point to an engagement with the years 1933-45 that came earlier and was more intense than anything we find in Japan, or in Austria, self-styled ‘first victim’ of National ...”

“... concerned with British music should read this book and ponder. Like Professor Ehrlich, Nancy Reich, in her thorough biography of Clara Schumann, throws new light on the position of women in music. The status of the German musician is underlined in the portrait of her father, Friedrich Wieck, a prosperous piano teacher, and family patriarch of an ...”

“... policy was said to be influenced by West’s views, as channelled through his bedtime reading of Robert Kaplan’s more recent travelogue, Balkan Ghosts. A counter-narrative soon surfaced from the advocates of intervention. They argued that Bosnia, and especially Sarajevo, was not the problem but the solution: a multi-confessional, multicultural haven of ...”

“... now the standard work and must stand alongside Ian Kershaw’s Hitler, Ulrich Herbert’s Best and Robert Gerwarth’s Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich as one of the landmark Nazi biographies. As the author of a celebrated study of the Holocaust, Longerich is better able than his predecessors to situate Himmler within the vast machinery of ...”

“... was already commissioner for raw materials and foreign exchange, and on 18 October 1936 he became Reich Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, a new economic strategy designed to prepare the country for war within four years and bypass the economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, whose cautious funding of the military threatened to undermine the rapid rearmament ...”

“... agricultural estates all across Eastern Europe, which, Hitler fantasised, would be linked to the Reich by high-speed railways and autobahns. Anywhere between 30 million and 45 million Slavs living in the region were to be left to die, deliberately deprived of food and medical care. The plan envisaged that some 85 per cent of Poles, 64 per cent of Ukrainians ...”

“... would have been stronger if he’d noted that only one of his Germans, Hilsenrath, was born in the Reich. Becker was born in Poland, Wander in Austria and Adler in what, at the time, was the third city of Austro-Hungary. Adler is the only member of this group whose books risk aestheticising the killing, which he describes in a range of metaphors: the Lustig ...”

“... moment in Foucault’s Pendulum someone snaps his fingers excitedly and says: ‘It’s obvious. Reich was definitely a Templar.’ ‘Everyone was, except us,’ retorts his colleague. That is indeed the point. Hermetic investigation always reveals that every secret society and mystic body of lore, from the Masons and the Illuminati to the Elders of Zion ...”

“... effects of denunciations. Unfortunately, her account lacks the imaginative and literary power of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror. ‘In the Soviet case,’ she writes, in a fairly typical passage, ‘ “manipulative” denunciations should be considered part of a complex of informal mechanisms of citizen agency, including client-patron relations and ...”

“... or a German’s pig to slaughter and eat. Meanwhile, the enemy, who should have known that the Reich was beaten, still tenaciously fought back. Blijenbeek Castle, whose defenders had mown down an entire company of the 52nd Lowland Division when it had tried to scale the walls, was ‘finally taken only after the RAF had dropped nine 1,000-pound bombs ...”

“... Best known​ for his short prose sketches, the idiosyncratic Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) liked to call himself a ‘craftsman novelist’, cobbling together ‘a long, plotless, realistic story’. He insisted that his varied sketches – prose poems, portraits of friends and strangers, detailed accounts of walks through the city or countryside, stray bits of literary or art criticism, oddball fantasies – were actually fragments of a single work, which ‘might be described as a variously sliced up or torn apart book of myself ...”

“... is a photograph of the Young Theatre of Riga performing Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich on bicycles. We are not told what the critics said about this event. Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of messenger boys delivering pizzas on unicycles? The author, Pryor ...”

“... on the presumption that it is more polite to behave as if the past had never happened: the Third Reich, the Pétain regime in France and the near-anarchy which followed it; the forty years when Spain kowtowed to the Generalisimo; the equally long period of happy fascism in Portugal; the ups and downs of Italy before, during and after the revival of the Roman ...”

“... so much of Hollywood, of New York. Had killed the Rosenbergs and was even then gunning for Wilhelm Reich.’ Di Prima forced the agents into the street. This wasn’t her last run-in with the authorities: her connection to anarchist politics and the Black freedom struggle made her a constant target of police surveillance and harassment. Later, when she moved ...”