Christopher Saunders’s Reviews > The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s > Status Update

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."