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“... Sometimes countries – the United States or Israel – arise from nothing. But the subject of Mr Haffner’s book is odder. It first appeared from nowhere and then disappeared quite without trace: to him, a sad disappearance. He is a distinguished journalist, who was born in Berlin but has spent much of his time in England and written for the British ...”

“... if it surrendered more sovereignty to a more closely integrated European Union. The journalist Sebastian Haffner used to say that ‘we are living in Hitler’s Europe.’ He meant that the whole Cold War landscape – the division of Germany, the advance of Russian power into Central Europe – became inevitable when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet ...”

“... for example, the seductive arguments for Prussia pursued by that marvellous historian Sebastian Haffner). Yet the suggestion cannot rest on historical opinion; it must be demonstrated to be possible, in other words, to be concretely imaginable: and this is the vocation of Grass’s novel. His protagonist (there are really two of them, perhaps ...”

“... of his case, Gerwarth is up against a book first translated into English almost fifty years ago: Sebastian Haffner’s tremendous Failure of a Revolution. Haffner, who spent the war in Britain, returned to West Germany in the 1960s to become the giant of left-wing but non-Marxist commentary. When his book was first ...”

“... of any young German caught up in the war’s final bloodbath. Inevitably, it will be compared to Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler (Geschichte eines Deutschen), the memoir Haffner wrote in 1939 at the start of his British exile which became a posthumous bestseller in 2000. A generation separated ...”

“... anti-Nazi intellectuals, known to some on the staff as the ‘German exotics’. In fact, only Sebastian Haffner and E.F. Schumacher were German; Isaac Deutscher, Arthur Koestler and Jon Kimche came respectively from Poland, Hungary and Switzerland. Several were Jews; another new recruit, the reporter Cyril Dunn, wrote that Astor had an ...”