Richard Overy
He Regretted Having Been So Benevolent
Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich
By Joachim Fest
Macmillan 190pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
EVERY TIME YET another book appears on Hitler’s last days it is tempting to ask: what more is there to learn? Less and less is the answer. Everything there is to know about the last days has been fled, published, exhaustively examined. The more fanciful speculations have been overturned. Hitler never was spirited away, or replaced by a double. The things that cannot be said with certainty (did Hitler shoot himself in the temple, or through the mouth?) will now never be established. We have reached the end of the trail.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings