Germany’s post-war recovery was no economic miracle
Lord Macaulay wrote that ‘during the century and a half which followed the Conquest there is, to speak strictly, no…
Will the next generation wonder what the fuss over Brexit was about?
Robert Tombs’s new book is not long: 165 pages of argument, unadorned by maps or images. But brevity is good,…
Whitewashing Bismarck just won’t wash
The reviewer’s first duty is to declare any skin he may have in the game, so here goes: I write…
The greatest ‘if only’ of modern history... that the Weimar Republic had succeeded
Has it ever occurred to you that the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 might have won us the war? Until…
Hitler’s legacy: two books examine different aspects of the horror that was Germany, 1945
Two new books offer very different takes on the utter ruination of Germany in 1945. Each in its own way…
The absurd struggle to claim ownership of Kafka
Benjamin Balint’s Kafka’s Last Trial is a legal and philosophical black comedy of the first water, complete, like all the…
Nietzsche’s intense friendship with Wagner forms the core of Sue Prideaux’s excellent new biography
In 1945, with the second world war won bar the shouting, Bertrand Russell polished off his brief examination of Friedrich…
