Berlin

The scene is the common room of All Souls College, Oxford, in the first week of March 1963. It is the idle half-hour after lunch when fellows slump into armchairs and gaze out of the window at the sparrows in the Fellows’ Garden. David Caute, a young first-class mind in his mid-twenties, is buttonholed by the revered figure of Sir Isaiah Berlin. What did Caute think of Isaac Deustcher? Did he admire him, as so many young scholars on the left did? Well, Caute replied cautiously, he knew Deutscher’s book on Stalin and his trilogy on Trotsky.  ‘Quite sufficient.’ And Berlin bounded off into one of his rapid-fire bombardments: there

At midday on Thursday, 8 June 1933 — Erik Larson is very keen on his times — the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a call put through to the history department at the University of Chicago. At midday on Thursday, 8 June 1933 — Erik Larson is very keen on his times — the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a call put through to the history department at the University of Chicago. Since taking office in early March Roosevelt had been trying to fill the post of ambassador to Berlin, and with none of the usual suspects prepared to take on the job and Congress on

Peter Parker is beguiled by a novel approach to the lives of Europe’s intellectual elite in flight from Nazi Germany In his time, Heinrich Mann was considered one of Germany’s leading writers and intellectuals. Unlike his rivalrous younger brother Thomas, who always put his literary career before any other consideration, Heinrich was an early and outspoken critic of the Nazis, and so forced to leave Germany in February 1933. He was based for several years in the south of France, while travelling around the world to denounce the regime he had left behind, and he eventually emigrated to America in 1940, settling in Los Angeles. Unlike many European emigrants who