Status Updates From Believe Nothing Until it is...

“But he was influenced also by his exposure from an early age to the desperate insecurities of Central Europe between the wars, where not letting one’s day-to-day life be poisoned by approaching danger required a constant fatalistic optimism.”

“In the same year that Isherwood presented a slightly modified version of Jean in Berlin as the flighty, apolitical Sally Bowles in his novella of that name, she was in reality reporting from the front line in Spain, where she came close to being killed by German bombers.”

all of the revolutionary women in this story are just so much interesting …

“If the Nazis had one area of real expertise, it was in propaganda, and they took media coverage at home and abroad very seriously. They were acutely sensitive to foreign press criticism … [Hitler] said that ‘a first condition of the calming of international relations was therefore the cooperation of all peoples to make an end of journalistic free-booting’.”

“What was terrifying about this man was that he was a damn fool – and could only have been employed by a regime of, basically, damn fools who could blow up half the world out of sheer stupidity.”

how fitting.

“Paradoxically, and on the whole encouragingly, all the most dangerous practical part of the job was done by people who considered themselves neutral and non-political, but could understand a human need when they finally saw it’.”

“You must always remember that if a mistake can be made, they’ll make it.”

“You must always remember that if a mistake can be made, they’ll make it.”

“Hope admits to mixed feelings, as a feminist, about these revelations, saying, ‘I couldn’t help being amused to see male arrogance brought down so easily, but at the same time I was shocked at her female wiles. Didn’t Claud deserve fair warning? Yet how could I betray another woman’s confidences?”

relatable.

“…Foreign Office [who] believed that ‘the Hitler government, in spite of some regrettable lapses, is a healthy and stabilising factor in Europe”

“One should perhaps avoid being hypercritical of acts of high policy. Take the charitable view, bearing in mind that every government will do as much harm as it can and as much good as it must.”

“Claud found that his own views of divisions between nationalities rather than social classes being the driving force of history, fostered by Berkhamsted and Oxford, sounded bizarre to them: ‘Perhaps’, he asked Berta, ‘they think I am merely idiotic?’
‘No, no,’ she replied. ‘They expect anything of an Englishman.”

took me out.