Christopher Saunders > Recent Status Updates

May need to seriously revise my positive rating for this book. The author's assertion that there's no proof the Germans carried out sabotage operations in America during the war is demonstrably false, and blaming the Black Tom explosion on the Irish (!) apropos of nothing is even more insulting.

Managed to obtain an (imperfect but legible) English translation of this work. Hopefully it will be worth the time invested, the OAS fascinates me but there's so little literature on it in English!

p. 36 "[Hitler] pushed his way through the police cordon and sat by one of the pillars in the vestibule, gnawing his finger ends and sipping a litre of beer which had cost a billion marks."

Also, Calvin Coolidge's memoirs are "a deadly reflection of a dessicated personality" (p. 65).

p. 25 (cont'd): "More than that, [fascism] was a kind of political mysticism. Mussolini himself...was "a mystic of risk, with a quasi-religious faith in the absolute value of dynamism, considered as having an efficaciousness superior to all the calculations of reason."

Much in this book that is both instructive and well-said. Glad to see that Brendon's acerbic style translates well from one topic to another.

p. 25 (cont'd): "More than that, [fascism] was a kind of political mysticism. Mussolin himself...was "a mystic of risk, with a quasi-religious faith in the absolute value of dynamism, considered as having an efficaciousness superior to all the calculations of reason."

Much in this book that is both instructive and well-said. Glad to see that Brendon's acerbic style translates well from one topic to another.

p. 25: "Mussolini made up his own reality as he went along...Mussolini was an animator of fantasy, the chief character as well as the author in his own theatre of the absurd. Fascism was form rather than content, style rather than substance. It was, as Mussolini said, "a doctrine of action. It was a revolt against the crippling alienation and the stultifying conformity of bourgeois society."

p. 18: [on the Paris Peace Conference] "During interminable translations Wilson often read a newspaper. Lansing sketched hobgoblins. Lloyd George talked. Arthur Balfour, the feline British Foreign Secretary, catnapped, as did the Tiger (Clemenceau) himself. Count Makino of Japan silently, impassively observed."

Anyone else getting a plague of pseudonymous Chinese bot followers? I'm getting pretty tired of endless comments consisting of random letters.

p. 43: "Wrestlers, hockey players and congressmen rarely kill each other, though they make a good show of it."