Simone Veil, the former French lawyer and politician who became the first President of the European Union, was born Simone Jacob in 1927. In A Life, she describes in vivid detail a childhood of happiness and innocence spent in Nice that came to an abrupt end in 1944 when, at the age of 17, she was deported with her family to concentration camps. Though she survived, her mother, father, and brother all died in captivity. After the liberation of Auschwitz and upon her return to Fran...

The Veiled Sun: From Auschwitz to New Beginnings by Paul Schaffer and Translated from the French by Vivian Felsen with a Foreword by Serge Klarsfeld and an Introduction by Simone Veil.The Veiled Sun is a Holocaust memoir written in a highly literate style. Paul Schaffer spent his teenage years on the run from the Nazis in Austria, Belgium and France, and then in Auschwitz from 1942 to 1945. He survived to become a successful industrialist who was honoured by the g...

Simone Veil has spoken on very different stages and subjects, and before extremely diverse audiences. The speeches collected here represent only a fraction of her public dialogues: those given over the last six years in her capacity as president of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. Having written those last words, I must immediately correct myself: when our president discusses the Shoah, she is firstly and always Madame Veil, the Auschwitz survivor, matured and enriched by her Fre...

READ JOHN KAMPFNER'S NEW BOOK: IN SEARCH OF BERLIN: THE STORY OF A REINVENTED CITY***THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER***BOOK OF THE YEAR IN GUARDIAN, ECONOMIST & NEW STATESMAN'Excellent and provocative... a passionate, timely book.' Sunday Times'A fine new book... thoughtful, deeply reported and impeccably even-handed.' The TimesEmerging from a co...

The definitive history of Europe’s rebirth.From the ruins of war to the rise of the European Union, Postwar tells the sweeping story of Europe’s transformation in the 20th century. Historian Tony Judt draws on a lifetime of scholarship to chart how nations reckoned with totalitarianism, and forged a new vision of democracy and cooperation.Combining intellectual depth with narrative power, Judt’s masterpiece offers profound lessons about memory, ide...

Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), often referred to as The Communist Manifesto, was first published on February 21, 1848, and is one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League and written by communist theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it laid out the League's purposes and program. The Manifesto suggested a course of action for a proletarian (working class) revolution to overthrow the bour...

Hitler and the Holocaust is the product of a lifetime’s work by one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of anti-Semitism and modern Jewry. Robert S. Wistrich begins by reckoning with Europe’s long history of violence against the Jews, and how that tradition manifested itself in Germany and Austria in the early twentieth century. He looks at the forces that shaped Hitler’s belief in a "Jewish menace" that must be eradicated, and the process by which, once Hit...

**Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize 2024****A Financial Times Best Book of 2023**'A moving love letter to Europe' Lea Ypi, author of FreeDrawing from the people who lived it, Homelands explores how Europe slowly recovered and rebuilt from World War Two. And then faltered.Timothy Garton Ash, our greatest writer about Europe, has spent a lifetime studying Europe and t...

Arendt was one of the most important thinkers of her time, famous for her idea of "the banality of evil" which continues to provoke debate. This collection provides new and startling insight into Arendt's thoughts about Watergate and the nature of American politics, about totalitarianism and history, and her own experiences as an émigré.Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations is an extraordinary portrait of one of the twentieth century's ...

Aesthete, sensualist, bookworm, politician of Machiavellian cunning: François Mitterrand was a man of exceptional gifts and exceptional flaws who, during his fourteen years as President, strove to drag his tradition-bound and change-averse country into the modern world.As a statesman and as a human being, he was the incarnation of the mercurial, contrarian France which Britain and America find so perennially frustrating. He embodied the ambiguities and the contradictions of a natio...

An astonishing and heartbreaking study of the Polish Holocaust survivors who returned home only to face continued violence and anti-Semitism at the hands of their neighbors“[Fear] culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy during World War II cannot fail to feel it.”—Elie WieselFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK W...

This Very Short Introduction provides an analytical narrative of the main events and developments in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1936. It examines the impact of the revolution on society as a whole--on different classes, ethnic groups, the army, men and women, youth. Its central concern is to understand how one structure of domination was replaced by another. The book registers the primacy of politics, but situates political developments firmly in the context of massive economic, social...