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“... About Hitler I can’t think of anything to say,’ thus Karl Kraus in a famous aside in 1935. But a great deal has been said about him ever since and no one has been better at saying it than Alan Bullock. His Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, published in 1952, is still the best biography, and one of the best books on the Nazi phenomenon in general. Only a very few other works come to mind which are in the same league: Konrad Heiden’s history of the Nazi Party and his Hitler biography – but they appeared in 1932 and 1936 respectively – and Joachim Fest’s fine work of 1972 ...”

“... Twenties and Thirties to desperately precarious survival in Berlin during the Second World War. Walter Laqueur is Director of the Institute of Contemporary History, and effectively The Missing Years, his first novel, is history masquerading as fiction masquerading as autobiography. The fictional impulse seems slight: Dr Lasson, scarcely ...”

“... for instance, gave plenty of opportunity for passive resistance and quietly effective sabotage. Walter Laqueur has set himself the uncontroversial task of finding out whether in 1941-42 people did know of the Final Solution, and when. He discusses documentary, press and radio evidence, drawn from many sources, and his book is divided into sections that ...”

“... While writing World of Secrets, Walter Laqueur had discussions with the present and all surviving past directors of the Central Intelligence Agency save one, as well as with other senior Intelligence official and their main customers. Such goings-on would be unthinkable, or at the very least unavowable, in Britain ...”

“... and began to pace up and down his large study, as usual holding his unlit pipe in his hand.’ Walter Laqueur’s book is concise, free of false stereotypes and logically argued. Each statement has a source reference, and the work rests on a solid knowledge of the history of the Soviet Union, accumulated by ...”

“... black granite tombstone in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg, an Elysium of the burgher dead: ‘Walter Laqueur MD’ is inscribed in Jugendstil characters, the same lettering in which ‘Dr Laqueur’ appears on the plaque that was once outside his radiology office and is now on my gate in Berkeley. There were also ...”

“... In the first few pages of Walter Laqueur’s The Age of Terrorism (largely a reworking and updating of his 1977 work, Terrorism), the author attempts to confront the old adage that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ Laqueur will have none of it: Of all the observations on terrorism this is surely one of the tritest ...”

“... The Country, which is concerned with old age, death and family bereavement, is adroitly restricted to an account of four visits. The first two, at intervals of a year, are paid by Daniel Francoeur, an American writer long resident in London, to his aging parents in Rhode Island. He finds them unhappy, constrained by repressed hostility and old disappointments ...”

“... of three new books by experienced analysts of Soviet history and society. The most wide-ranging is Walter Laqueur’s. Against a background of Russian and Soviet history, and drawing on an impressive quantity of Soviet and Western sources, he assesses glasnost’s impact on culture, politics, historical debate, the economy, social problems and foreign ...”

“... then so, it appears, have the prospects for conducting a successful guerrilla war.’ She quotes Walter Laqueur: Guerrilla war may not entirely disappear ... but it is on the decline, together with its traditional foes – colonialism on the one hand, and liberal democracy on the other. Thus the function of guerrilla movements is reverting to what it ...”

“... his career by studying the Enlightenment, sexuality and psychoanalysis. No cathexis on Germany. Walter Laqueur, roughly Stern’s age and like him from Breslau, says that he felt remarkably at home when he returned after the war. But, he writes in his autobiography, ‘I did not find German postwar politics and culture particularly fascinating; in any ...”

“... scholarship. Trying to explain the outrage felt by many Jewish readers of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Walter Laqueur suggested that it was not so much what she had said, but how she had said it: ‘The Holocaust is a subject that has to be confronted in a spirit of humility; whatever Mrs Arendt’s many virtues, humility was not one of them.’ Born in ...”

“... a second heart attack and died in her Riverside Drive apartment.‘The Arendt cult is a riddle,’ Walter Laqueur sighed in the 1990s, as Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire had sighed before him. So much reverent attention for someone so ‘devoid of originality, depth and a systematic character’. Was it because women like reading other women, ...”

“... as the more accurate designation of the events; and he rejects the term ‘Holocaust’ (as Walter Laqueur did before him), a word that has petrified into an empty cliché since it was given currency by an American television show. What was done to the Jews, Mayer rightly observes, has nothing to do with the word’s traditional meaning: they were ...”

“... other records, the international dimension has now been treated in works by Bernard Wasserstein, Walter Laqueur and Martin Gilbert.Some areas still require further research. In response partly to the outrageous claims made by David Irving, there has recently been some discussion of the exact timing and authorship of the specific decisions to exterminate ...”