Albert einstein

It’s doubtful whether Asa Briggs ever had an idle moment in his life. Bestselling historian, pioneer of the new universities of the 1960s, chronicler of the BBC, champion of adult education, academic globetrotter and much more besides, he possessed phenomenal energy. He was a miracle of the kind of boundless enthusiasm that his Victorian hero Samuel Smiles had extolled in his book Self-Help. Short and tubby, with large glasses, Briggs effortlessly outpaced academic colleagues who tended to be left panting behind him. A joke did the rounds that if a word were to be coined for a unit of intellectual energy it should be an ‘Asa’. He was dubbed ‘the

Late one evening in 1994, an Italian magistrate walked into a storage room at the military prosecutor’s offices in Rome. There his eye was caught by a 6ft-high wooden cupboard, curiously positioned so that it faced the wall. His interest piqued, he pulled the cupboard around and opened its doors. Inside were stacks of documents dating from the mid-1940s. In all, there were 695 long-lost war crime investigation files, detailing more than 2,000 incidents that had taken place in Italy during the fascist period. Picking up the story, the Italian media dubbed the cupboard the ‘wardrobe of shame’ – which quickly became a metaphor for what Thomas Harding calls ‘Italy’s