The Books I Read In March

 Fiction

'The Amulet of Samarkand' by Jonathan Stroud

This is a children's book that is often likened to the Harry Potter series. Stroud actually makes a passing jibe at apprentice wizards being sent to boarding schools to learn their craft. Though there is a sense of a world of magic, it intrudes more into the actual world than in the Potter novels. The British parliament is entirely run by wizards who provide ministers. There is that kind of mid-20th Century undefined time period, though used in many British novels, not just fantasy ones; at times it seems to have hangovers from the Victorian era, echoed by the fact that Britain is the centre of an empire run on magic and fighting on continental Europe with its arch-rival centred on Prague.

Magic in this world is centred on the use of demons/spirits of various strengths, thus what wizards can predominantly do is summon such creatures and put them to work. This culturally appropriates Middle Eastern spirits including djinn and afrits, with no explanation how Europeans came to be using them.The hero of the story, Nathaniel, apprenticed to the ineffectual Arthur Underwood at the age of five manages to secure a djinni, Bartimaeus, a middle-ranked creature in effect to exact revenge on those who have been cruel to him throughout his childhood. However, this then draws him into a conspiracy to trigger a coup d''état. The treatment of Nathaniel is very reminiscent of Victorian novels too but by the end it turns into a magic adventure story in a contemporary setting with which we are familiar.

While you can draw parallels to the Potter books, Stroud works hard to distinguish them. Nathaniel for much of the book is driven by revenge. Unlike Harry Potter he is also very isolated, his parents having sold him into apprenticeship and others he relies on briefly being killed. The main strength though is the fact that the alternate chapters are told by Bartimaeus a rather world worn and cynical creature who is ancient and has his own antagonisms going back many centuries; he is able to shape shift too. It is interesting the trilogy is named after him rather than Nathaniel.

While more juvenile than I had expected, the novel is engaging and I enjoyed it. If I see the following two books in the series I would buy them.

'The Friends of Harry Perkins' by Chris Mullin

Like a lot of people of my generation I was very influenced by the dramatisation of Mullin's book 'A Very British Coup' (novel 1982; TV series 1988 available still to watch on All4: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/a-very-british-coup). Harry Perkins was the left-wing Labour politician elected Prime Minister in that previous novel, before being forced from office by the Americans. This book is set in the 2010s following the Brexit vote. Mullin in the introduction outlines the challenges of trying to have this novel feature characters from the first, some 35 years before. He has to make some of them have very long lives. I feel it would have been much better for him to set one or more books sometime in those three decades or to bring in a new cast, even if they were children of the previous characters.

The novel is effectively a 'what if?' history. Perkins remained in parliament and it has gone through many years of Conservative rule, leading to the referendum and Brexit withdrawal but under different politicians to those we know in our world. Labour at the start of the novel is led by a woman. Fred Thompson who was a minor character in the previous book rises to be Labour leader, though to the left of Sir Keir Starmer and manages to win an election in the late 2010s. Overall the book feels very rushed with so much to cover - including Thompson's private life - in a short book.

The climax is telegraphed well in advance. It feels rather like a book which Mullin has to work out various irritations. Thompson and his coterie still mourning Perkins meet in an Austrian restaurant very akin to 'The Gay Hussar' where Michael Foot and his gang used to dine regularly. Mullin is clearly distressed by the killing of Jo Cox and felt that he had to look at that danger for politicians too. Thus, there is a real mish-mash of elements which are straitjacketed into the framework he had created for 'A Very British Coup' while failing to have the genuine jeopardy of that context.

There was a lot which could have been done better in this book. It would have been interesting for him to explore the challenges of a left-wing leader in the current age, even if he avoided comparisons with Corbyn. It would have also been interesting to look at why Labour has never actually had a female leader, whereas the Conservatives have had three who have become prime ministers. The personal violence against MPs would have been another area to explore. However, Mullin seems to have felt shackled to his earlier successful book and in this one as a result has a context in which he cannot really handle all the various elements successfully or, as he effectively admits in the foreword, feasibly.

'Dead Souls' by Ian Rankin

This is the 10th Inspector John Rebus novel and it is strange that only getting this far through the series, I am feeling that as an author Rankin is reaching the standard that he was strangely acclaimed for almost right from the outset. 

This is a very messy novel, with Rebus back on alcohol; his daughter temporarily confined to a wheelchair after the accident in the previous novel, and in an on/off relationship with his lover Patience. There are a number of components which it takes a long time to see are related, but in many ways this makes it feel rather more like an account of genuine detective work. Rebus is angered when he finds a convicted paedophile who has served his time in prison has been housed in the area and effectively sets out to take revenge by 'outing' him. While he begins to regret this decision later, he is too late. There are also the suicide of a colleague and the disappearance of the son of old friends, one of whom Rebus dated when a young man in Fife and he finds he remains attracted to, while also has questions about his own path triggered. There is also a murderer repatriated from the USA to Edinburgh who is allowed to get away with playing with both the police and a journalist; a very slimy character who seems largely untouchable even when he beats up Rebus and later a retired detective too. Added to that there is case against two child abusers at a children's home and who the third man was with them on a particular occasion.

The book has quite a toing and froing, but Rankin manages not to lose the reader. There are long sections of self-reflection but again he just manages to keep these from getting repetitive or tedious. While most of the questions are resolved, there is no big conclusion and that adds to the sense of realism. Rebus even more than before comes over as a world-weary detective running up a string of horrific incidents, injustice and the unsolvable. This novel might frustrate readers looking for a clear tying off of elements, but I feel it is one of the better ones in the Rebus series.

'Talon' by Julie Kagawa

A lot of fantasy, especially that written by women gets 'dumped' into the YA category no matter its focus or the characters. This novel, is very clearly both fantasy and YA. It is one of numerous books in recent years featuring dragons living in contemporary society who are able to shift to being humans. The last one of these I read was 'Chasing Embers' (2016) by James Bennett (not the one by Rachel Skatvold): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/03/books-i-read-in-march.html and this is a now well-established sub-genre.  

Kagawa includes the urban fantasy/dystopian tropes of sinister authoritarian organisations - Talon which rules over dragons putting them into a rigid caste system when they mature but eliminates 'weaklings' and renegades and the Order of St. George a human organisation of highly trained soldiers whose mission is to kill all dragons they encounter. Kagawa gets in a lot of YA tropes - teenaged sister and brother sent to spend the summer on the beach in California, surfing, star-crossed first loves, at the mall, at the funfair, two handsome dudes for the heroine to be torn between, one a mysterious biker.

Ember and her twin brother Dante - rather giveaway names for dragons! - are sent to Crescent Beach for their last phase of training before allocation in the Talon caste system. They have to prove that they can blend in with humans and naturally make friends. The focus is primarily on Ember who falls for another visitor to the town, a 17-year old called Garret, unaware that from orphaned child he has been trained as an excellent soldier for the Order and has been sent to Crescent Beach to hunt down new 'sleeper' dragons. You can probably tell how this unfolds in a very Montagues and Capulets way. Biker Riley, also attracts Ember's attention as he is a 'rogue' dragon, Cobalt, who has broken away from the authoritarian rule of Talon and is hunted by both them and the Order.

I read this book expecting it rather to go through the motions. We see first person through the eyes of Ember and Garrett and later Riley too. However, Kagawa's writing has to be commended that even with so many tropes, she rises above them to provide a genuinely gripping, fast paced story which appears to have genuine jeopardy while also grappling with the challenges that 'ordinary' US teenagers face as they approach adulthood. In addition, there are unexpected twists and I felt she ably dodged some of the possible expected outcomes. While I would not rush out and buy the next book, if I came across I would buy it. Kagawa certainly makes a strong argument for people not looking down on fantasy, even those books, which aim clearly to appeal to a YA audience.

Non-Fiction

'Nazism 1919-1945. Volume 4: The German Home Front in World War II' ed. by Jeremy Noakes

This fourth volume came out in 1998 so while the document numbering continues on from the previous three volumes (the page numbering does not) it is a bit apart from those volumes published 1983-88 (themselves drawing on 1970s volumes organised differently). They all got new covers in the 2000s. In addition, while Geoffrey Pridham is still alive today, this fourth volume was edited only by Jeremy Noakes.

This book might seem to have a rather narrow focus but in fact is a really useful supplement especially to Volumes 2 and 3. For example, Volume 4 looks at the concentration camps whereas Volume 3 focused on the extermination camps. Volume 4 picks up from the pre-war analysis of Nazi Germany's economy and society seen in Volume 2 and so on. Thus, while coming late, it really rounded out the series. There are chapters in Volume 4 which cover aspects often neglected by general surveys of the Nazi regime, notably welfare, attitudes to youth and women and indeed to sex. Things such as the NSV welfare body; the evacuation of children from bombed cities and morale, all are handled well and provide a useful counter-balance to portrayals of these aspects of the British wartime experience which have been covered more extensively.

One point is that while there are lots of useful documents and sources referenced in Volume 4, they tend to be included in full, which can lead to extensive (small print) sections that you sometimes feel are not adding and that the smaller extracts pointing to the kernel of the issue to be discussed, used in the earlier volumes were often more effective.

Another point which I meant to raise when reviewing Volume 3 back in January:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-book-i-read-in-january.html was how scarily current the rhetoric which appears throughout these books seems to a reader in the early 2020s. I know it is easy to label alt right politicians and commentators as 'Fascists' or 'Nazis' but reading through the texts translated into English, you keep hearing echoes of what you might hear if you turn on the television these days. 

The whole attitude from Hitler, Goebbels, et al, that they were at the same time, supremely powerful and assured of victory yet always insisting that they were the real victims; that others were responsible for the conflicts, is so often used nowadays and it is very unsettling when a turn of phrase you read meshes precisely with what you can hear or read quoted from contemporary politicians. I guess the BBC TV series, 'The Nazis: A Warning from History'  (1997; my emphasis) had it spot-on in that title. It is not a question of bandying about terms like Nazi, it is much more about seeing these unsettling parallels and knowing to what they can lead. As I used to remind students, every single step towards the use of Auschwitz was bad; right from the ending of German democracy and removal of civil rights from Jews.

This has been an excellent series of books and while there is a lot to cover, if you really want an insight to the Nazi regime, because of the use of many hundreds of original sources, I would heartily recommend these books.

The Books I Read In January

Fiction

'Azincourt' by Bernard Cornwell

As the title suggests this novel is set around the events of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. While the French village nearby is called Azincourt, it has gone down in British history as Agincourt and that provided the US title of this book. Published in 2008, it owes a lot to Cornwell's novel 'Harlequin' (2000), the first of The Grail Quest series which I read in July 2020: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html  That featured the 1346 Battle of Crécy. As in that book it features an English archer, this time Nicholas Hook rather than Thomas of Hookton, who after a bloody rivalry in his village and trying to stop the rape and execution of some Lollards is sent to be part of the invasion of France that went so badly, especially due to the prolonged siege of Harfleur. There are many parallels with that earlier book, such as the hero fixing up with a woman in distress though this one survives longer than ones in that previous series.

Even for Cornwell, the book is very bloody and he does not hold back on the brutality of war at the time. The novel starts with the massacre at Soissons which gives Nicholas additional motives for his fight. It is better for being free of the mysticism seen in the holy grail books, though at times Nicholas does hear the voices of saints that guide him at vital moments. I guess, though given the beliefs of people at the time this can be seen as realistic. As usual, Cornwell provides a great deal of historical detail about battles but everyday aspects. However, this does not bog down the book, in part because the tensions between the characters are probably just the right side of overblown. While I did not enjoy this book as much as 'Fools and Mortals' (2017) which I read last year: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/04/books-i-read-in-april.html it is a decent novel and certainly better than the second and third books in The Grail Quest sequence.

'The Hanging Garden' by Ian Rankin

This is the ninth Inspector Rebus novel and in contrast to the preceding one, 'Black and Blue' (1997) which I read in November: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-books-i-read-in-november.html is much tauter. There is some confusion with it going back in time after the outset. However, the plot which involves Rebus going both after a new crime lord, Tommy Telford and investigating a potential Nazi war criminal living in Edinburgh is better focused without him gallivanting all over the place, rather it is more character focused. His daughter being harmed in a hit-and-run is another element, but in this novel Rankin balances them well and teases the reader with what is involved with the others. 

That element of wanting the novel to have a Hollywood feel, as he aimed to with 'Let It Bleed' (1995), http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/08/books-i-read-in-august.html is apparent here when there is a raid on a medical narcotics factory. The introduction of the Yakuza might be a step too far, but proves to be a necessary device to provide leverage when dealing with gangsters starting a gang war across Edinburgh and neighbouring locations. There is reference to the war in Bosnia and a trafficked refugee from it. Despite Rebus's connection to the woman, the engagement with her is rather unresolved and I did wonder if she turns up in subsequent books. Overall this was one of the more satisfying books in the Rebus series.

Non-Fiction

'Nazism 1919-1945. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination', ed. by J. [Jeremy] Noakes and G. [Geoffrey] Pridham

The title makes the focus of this book very clear. Like the preceding two volumes it draws heavily on a range of sources to provide translated primary material and connects this with historical analysis. That approach, hearing such a diverse range of voices is vital in this book because there are still included all the horrendous statistics of the German terror and extermination programmes. It is easy when reading of tens of thousands and then millions of victims to become numbed to what you are reading about. This is grounded in the human input.

This book is effectively a survey rather than focused explicitly on the Holocaust. It does however as with the previous volumes raise points that tend to get forgotten in a lot of general books on the Nazi regime which mean that though published in 1988 it remains of great value to students of the period. As with Volume 2, it continues to highlight how chaotic the regime was and is very adept at showing up the competing forces. This is an important counter to the portrayals of the regime as an efficient totalitarian machine. Looking at the foreign policy, the war and the racial policy, it shows the absence of clear plans beyond sweeping statements and the importance of local initiatives in moving forward activity, usually by men seeking Hitler's attention. The tensions that arose between wanting to exploit Jews, Poles and Russians for the war economy and wanting to slaughter them, comes out clearly. 

Karl Schleunes wrote of the 'twisted road to Auschwitz' and this book shows you that there were also many side turnings from that road. Though focused the book covers the 'euthanasia' programme, known later as T4, for killing disabled people and how, much stronger than I realised, it fed directly into the extermination camps. It looks at ghettoisation and Operation Reinhard and how the challenges of mass extermination combined with the wish to clear regions of Jews, drove the campaign on, but even then how much was chaotic and ad hoc. Overall, this book while chilling, successfully balances detail with the human perspective and I commend it now as a source even more than a third of a century on from its publication.

The Books I Read In November

Fiction

'Black and Blue' by Ian Rankin

It is interesting that the editions of Rankin's books I am reading have an introductory essay from the author about where he was in his career when he wrote the particular book. While this is the eighth book in his Rebus series, he still felt he was only just coming to the end of his kind of apprenticeship period. I guess a kind of scrappiness is something that is characteristic of Rankin's writing but though maybe he felt it took him time to get into producing these books, the rough edges do not seem to have put off readers. Perhaps this is because the tone seems to be appropriate for his character and the cases he deals with.

This one has quite a lot of running back and forth and is almost too inter-twined for its own good. A number of disparate cases including a man committing suicide while being tortured prove to be connected and link the drugs trade in Glasgow with that in Aberdeen especially supplying oil rig workers - the book was published in 1997 when the industry still seemed to have a glorious future. There is too much jammed into this book. There are environmental protestors one of whom is missing, maybe murdered. There is a separate element about Rebus being grilled about his involvement with the framing of another killer in the past which leads him having to be accompanied everywhere and leads to him giving up alcohol. There are also corrupt police involved and a parallel story which was not really necessary of a serial killer called Johnny Bible seeking to copy the genuine killer of the late 1960s Bible John. While the latter has never been found, Rankin features him as a character through whose eyes we see.

While there are some interesting elements including seeing a portrayal of 1990s Aberdeen and Shetland as well as Edinburgh, it is very much as if Rankin is trying too hard to get all these themes in when there was sufficient in the parallel plots to provide two, perhaps three novels. It does get rather tedious with all the travelling back and forth even when it shows you different settings. The distinctiveness of each of these is reduced by him putting in so much. Overall, while it has some good elements, it is too ragged, too full to be really engaging.

'Devices and Desires' by K.J. Parker [Tom Holt]

Not to be confused with the books of the same title by P.D. James [Phyllis James/White] or Kate Hubbard. This is another book in which less could have been more. It is a straight forward fantasy in a kind of non-magical late medieval style setting. While there are some nomadic tribes and an exotic 'old country' which provides mercenaries, the story is mainly focused around the city state of the Republic of Mezentine, a kind of Venice-like place which has a monopoly on the most advanced engineering, but is choking itself by barring innovations which go against the established specifications and the internecine fighting of guilds and bureaucracy. The two other states featured are mountain neighbours, with a low level of technological development, the Duchy of Eremia and the Duchy of Valdis which is wealthier due to silver deposits. The chief military engineer from Mezentine, Ziani Vaatzes escapes execution for creating a toy which is not compliant with specifications and finds refuge in Eremia which he equips with some of the Mezentine technology allowing the duchy to hold off invasion.

I have two problems with the novel. One is that we flit among the points of view of a number of different characters often very abruptly, taking us back and forth between Mezentine and the duchies and then within them, so bringing in sub-plots about a sense of duty and correspondence between the Duke of Eremia and Duchess of Vadania. This makes the book which is 706 pages in my edition a slow read as you have to keep reorientating yourself to whose view you are now seeing and then mercenary generals are also thrown into the mix.

The other thing is that it feels that Parker is trying to pull off a satirical, almost whimsical attitude in the vein of Jonathan Swift. He seeks to satirise perhaps fantasy writing or the real world elements that lay behind it. We see him take on bureaucracy, the attitudes of nobility, merchants, the military and engineers - especially tinkerers in their garages. This is done in a kind of affectionate way and yet it jars. It is not deft enough to be Swift or funny enough to be Terry Pratchett. It leaves a bitter taste when Parker describes torture, wounding and death. It would have been a lot better if either more light hearted, or particularly, if Parker had played it straight and put in a real sense of jeopardy and grimness rather than pulling his punches in an attempt to be satirical.

Non-Fiction
'Nazism 1919-1945. 2: State, Economy and Society, 1933-1939', ed. by J. [Jeremy] Noakes and G. [Geoffrey] Pridham

As with volume 1, this book is very useful in reminding you about aspects of the Nazi regime which these days too often get overlooked in general coverage. In its different sections, again drawing on speeches, articles, accounts and reports, it shows you the machinery of the regime and its contradictions. It considers a range of themes such as agriculture, the Nazi party and the state; women and young people. It is particularly strong on the economic aspects showing the growing militarised situation and how this was organised, pretty chaotically. There are also useful sections on public opinion and on anti-Semitism, important contexts ahead of Volume 3.

For me I think the most interesting aspect was simply how much conflict there was within the Nazi regime, aided by Hitler favouring a Social Darwinist approach to the development of the society and so at different times in different locales one of the sides would come out on top but elsewhere at other times another party or state agency would win through. We do see how the 'little Hitlers' were empowered and fought for supremacy often at a small, local level or in one sector. There was conflict within the Nazi party itself as well as outside it. In many ways you end up wondering how it managed to last so long without imploding, in part perhaps due to the efficiency of the civil service caste in Germany that while asserting its authority, did nothing to undermine the Nazi machine as a whole.

I feel this is a useful book for those interested in understanding how a dictatorship might work and showing how the Nazi regime was far from being a monolith, instead a seething mass of individual jealousies and attempts to grab power by men in various sectors and locations in the country and increasingly beyond too.

Books I Read In August

 Fiction

'Oh, Play That Thing!' by Roddy Doyle

I have read a number of Roddy Doyle books down the years (and watched dramatisations) so am familiar with Doyle's punctuation style, '-' to indicate dialogue and '(-' to indicate dialogue remembered from the past. I had not read 'A Star Called Henry' (1999) which precedes this book. However, as this novel sees the eponymous main character, Henry Smart, relocate from being a terrorist in Ireland to being a man willing to try anything for work in the USA, I thought that would not be a big problem. As it is, Doyle refers back so much to what happened in the previous novel that you can easily pick up the thread. Smart has emigrated in 1924 in large part to stay ahead of those wishing to kill him as a result of his actions during Ireland's battle for independence and the subsequent civil war. 

Smart ends up in New York and gets work as a sandwich board man and seller of illicit alcohol, the Prohibition being on. He hooks up with various women but they are sketchily drawn, often known by sobriquets like the 'the half sister' I imagine to show the shallowness of Smart connection to them. Too many violent men want to prevent Smart developing a business and he is repeatedly forced to flee further West as a kind of con man and odd-job man until he ends up in Chicago as jazz legend Louis Armstrong's minder. Then by a massive coincidence Smart runs into his own wife and daughter. The book, very episodic from the outset steadily unravels from then on, especially after Armstrong lets him go. Smart and his family (they have a son too now) become hoboes during the 1930s but become separated and by the end of the book Smart is somehow in the late 1940s randomly running into movie stars. The last sections of the book become as incoherent as a Hal Duncan or Michael Moorcock novel. It is as if Doyle has no idea how to end it.

The best bits of this book are the settings. Doyle does very well at conjuring up New York, Chicago and some smaller US towns in the 1920s and 1930s very evocatively. There are also great scenes around the performances, not just in jazz clubs and with Armstrong, but also when one of Smart's girlfriends becomes an evangelical demagogue, making use of Smart's connections to Armstrong to make records of her speeches. Doyle is great on performance as we know from 'The Commitments' (1987). There are some great ideas in here, but they are not woven together in a way that really carries the reader onward and instead the book becomes a real slog. Something more narrowly focused, perhaps just around working with Armstrong would have made the strong parts shine rather than be subdued in narrative that really loses the plot.

'Let It Bleed' by Ian Rankin

I guess I have at times accused Rankin of becoming a little directionless in some of his novels too, though never to the scale which Doyle does in 'Oh, Play That Thing! (2004). Perhaps because as in the essay in the front of my edition of this novel, Rankin explains how it was going to be a movie, it is tighter than some of the Rebus stories. It is connected into what has proceeded, though with a bit of an ellipsis as you tend to find, so that Rebus has reconnected with his daughter but has moved out from living with his lover Patience. In this novel, in fact, he gets no sex, but continues with his alcoholism back in his old flat. He is aided by two loyal colleagues, notably DC Siobhan Clarke who plays a growing role in the novels and is almost like the flip-side daughter for Rebus.

Starting with a messed-up kidnapping which ends in dramatic death, this story does connect into a lot of issues facing Edinburgh and indeed Scotland, when it was published, i.e.1995, still under a Conservative government with the dregs of Thatcherite attitudes and with steps towards the resurrection of the Scottish Parliament four years later in the New Labour era. With its scenes of local government corruption, people making use of police and criminal contacts, this novel does feel very much in step with dramas of the 1980s/90s like 'Edge of Darkness' (1985), 'Centrepoint' (1990) 'Natural Lies' (1992) and though more light-hearted, in the same area, 'The Beiderbecke Affair' (1985) and its sequels. 

The sense in the 1980s that anything that created jobs was sacrosanct no matter what compromises had to be made still rings through this novel. There is also that aspect coming out of the 1960s that the wealthy and well-connected would often make use of the criminal class is also here. Rankin handles these well trodden ideas pretty well. He manages to balance the sense that people in power are untouchable no matter how corrupt with Rebus actually making some progress, which is a relief for the reader. There is both gritty violence white collar crime. As always Rankin makes good use of Edinburgh and the surrounding areas; the rich and the poor. Overall this is one of the best Rebus novels I have read and indeed could be read standalone without having to be familiar with the preceding six novels in the series.

Non-Fiction

'Nazism 1919-1945. 1: The Rise to Power, 1919-1934' ed. by J. [Jeremy] Noakes and G. [Geoffrey] Pridham

This is the first of four volumes of document readers on Nazism that began to be published in the mid-1970s but were revised and restructured in the 1980s with the new fourth volume appearing in 1998. What they are is a collection of translated documents illustrating what the Nazis were saying at different stages and what people were saying about them. They are connected by some narrative of events by Noakes and Pridham. Thus, the books differ from a standard history of the Nazi Party or indeed Germany at the time. This approach means that aspects which can sometimes be overlooked in some histories stand out. In this volume, for example, we learn much more about the factionalism and rivalries in the party and about the issues around the SA's part in it especially after Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. Also interesting are the views of members of the public from diaries about how they viewed the rise of the Nazis and the dilemmas that, for example, the Catholic Centre Party faced in terms of opposing or condoning the Nazis' actions. As is typical by the time the scale of the danger was apparent to many it was too late to stop. Some readers might find issues around tensions in what was an ill-balanced federal state too bureaucratic, but I think it is interesting to see how small states and Bavaria ploughing its own legal furrow were a doorway in for the Nazis. They also remind us that even before Hitler had become Chancellor there had been a coup d'état against the centre-left government of Prussia, the state which covered 3/5ths of Germany.

Despite the age of this book, it remains perceptive and an interesting angle on the rise of the Nazis. It is very accessible to the general reader as well as history students and academics. It is liable to give you insights into what happened and how, even if you feel you know the story pretty well already. I will read the other three volumes in the coming months.