Now available in paperback

Hitler’s empire disappeared as quickly as it was created, the shortest-lived of all imperial creations, and the last. Mark Mazower has written an absorbing and thought-provoking account of its rise and demise. By placing it in the global context of empire, he makes us see it fresh, and that is a considerable achievement. Paradoxically, perhaps, it makes us view the older European empires in a relatively favourable light. Growing up over decades, even centuries, they had remained in existence only through a complex nexus of collaboration, compromise and accommodation. Racist they may have been, murderous sometimes, even on occasion exterminatory, but none of them was created or sustained on the basis of such a narrow or exploitative nationalism as animated the Nazi empire.

(LRB 25 September 2008)

Allen Lane | hardback 726 pp. |ISBN: 9780713996814