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“... power-structures? The argument between ‘intentionalists’ and ‘structuralists’ is where Ian Kershaw came in. Originally a historian of medieval England, he switched tracks in the 1970s to work on the pioneering Bavaria Project led by Martin Broszat, which examined the attitudes of ordinary Germans during the Third Reich. His 1983 book on ...”

“... of a major European nation with a sophisticated culture and a firmly established legal order. Ian Kershaw has set out in his biography to solve this puzzle and is well equipped to do so: he is thoroughly at home with the new research that has been going on since the opening of the East European archives and, more important, was a member of the late ...”

“... the various actors, and the way these were transformed by the shifting tides of the war itself, Ian Kershaw gives a far stronger sense of the open-endedness of things. Very little about the war was inevitable. Many of the biggest decisions were, by most counts, irrational, even crazy: Britain’s to fight on against hopeless odds; Germany’s attack on ...”

“... table. Not so in 1944-45. Why not? Most wars between states in the modern age, according to Ian Kershaw, end with an agreed peace as soon as one side concedes defeat. It is possible to think of major exceptions to this rule, from Napoleon’s France in 1814 to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq two centuries later. Sometimes, too, there is regime change ...”

“... historian to seize on the ‘working towards the Führer’ interpretation seems to have been Ian Kershaw. Each in the procession of immense tomes of Adolf biography claims to be ‘definitive’, but Kershaw’s two volumes, ‘Hubris’ and ‘Nemesis’, still dominate more than 15 years after their ...”

“... significance even by so accomplished a book as this. Its author is unlikely to be disappointed. Ian Kershaw’s purpose has not been to write a full biography, or to rehabilitate a politician he considers to have been unjustly neglected. Instead, by examining in great detail one specimen of a particular species, he has made another foray into a ...”

“... the distinction seems (at least to Knausgaard) impossible to deny. Hence the rage he directs at Ian Kershaw, the author of the classic English-language biography. Knausgaard accuses Kershaw of adopting a dismissive attitude towards the young Hitler, of failing to warm to the passion and innocence of his subject. This ...”

“... groped their way from one evil to a greater evil. Quoted on the jacket of the hardback edition, Ian Kershaw calls Browning ‘one of the world’s leading historians of the Holocaust’. Actually, Browning’s position is unique. He alone takes us from the ‘ordinary’ killers to the extraordinary deed, exhausting the archives but projecting ...”

“... misleading picture. The ceremonial pathos and irrationalism of the Nazi appeal were real enough. Ian Kershaw, also writing in the Stachura volume, notes the mysticism which fired one convert to the NSDAP: ‘On April 20, in Kassel, for the first time I heard the Führer Adolf Hitler speak in person. After this, there was only one thing for me, either to ...”

“... elsewhere in German society. But as the best study of public opinion in the Third Reich, that of Ian Kershaw on Bavaria, a traditionally anti-semitic area, tells us with grim precision, to the population as a whole the massacre of the Jews ‘was of no more than minimal interest’. Anti-semitism was a force, not one of the strongest ones, in political ...”

“... Joachim Fest claimed that Hitler was unable ‘to lead an everyday life’, while more recently Ian Kershaw claimed that Hitler was devoted to playing the part of Führer to the extent of lacking a personal life. ‘Do we not thereby dehumanise him,’ Görtemaker asks, ‘and as a result let him escape our critical understanding?’ Görtemaker argues ...”

“... Birmingham City Council had already ordered an inquiry, to be headed by the education consultant Ian Kershaw. Gove nevertheless announced his own inquiry, bigger and certainly more inflammatory, as a result of his decision to select Clarke, a former head of counter-terrorism for the Metropolitan Police, to lead it. Clarke’s report was published just ...”

“... the diverse and changing attitudes to victory and defeat. The most notable of these accounts, Ian Kershaw’s The End, pointed to Hitler’s stubbornness and charisma, the ingrained sense of duty felt by officers and civil servants, the widespread (and justified) fear of the Red Army, and the sharp increase in the terror exercised on the military and ...”

“... killed Scheubner-Richter been a foot to the right, history would have taken a different course,’ Ian Kershaw remarks. Hitler mourned him as ‘irreplaceable’. Invading Poland 16 years later, he would famously ask his commanders, referring to the Poles, but with obvious implications for the Jews: ‘Who now remembers the Armenians?’ The Third Reich ...”

“... Hitler before the fateful departure for Munich. This is ostensibly a reply to the first volume of Ian Kershaw’s now canonical biography, and quite rightly takes issue with a literary and formal problem raised by biography in general, and Kershaw’s in particular – viz the inevitable projection backwards onto the ...”