HOW did such a loser win the adulation of a sophisticated nation? How did so resistible a rise go unresisted?
The really big questions remain, Kershaw concedes, for all the millions of man-years of scholarly study, though he himself has come
as close to answering them as anyone. Third Reich aficionados will sneer, but the rest of us have reason to be profoundly grateful for this new abridgement of Kershaw's classic two-volume biography. Though not quite the monument the earlier treatment was, this book presents the 20th century's most controversial life in a single sweep so mesmerizing that most readers will be happy to forgo a bit of chapter and verse.
ROAD MOVIES BY ALICE STARMORE (Windfall, £12.50) Three stars
A NICE-looking book, as you might expect in something put together and published by an artistic family: it's just a pity that Starmore's text isn't more arresting. Sure, she's well-travelled and intelligent, and can deliver an anecdote effectively, but too much of the time this book is borderline-banal. Over-dogged in unpacking the whole story of (it sometimes seems) every drive, every bus-journey, it can read like Mrs Pooter's postcards home.
BETWEEN WEATHERS BY RON McMILLAN (Sandstone, £11.99) "
Four stars
CLIFFS all around me are chillingly vast, bay window-like coastal curves, a hundred metres or more tall, with craggy offshore skerries the size of London office tower blocks."
But spectacular scenery is only one of the attractions the Shetlands has to offer for Ron McMillan, a traveller who seems really to have hit it off not just with the landscape of these northern islands but with their people. Serious but never ponderous; good-humoured without resorting to condescension, this is a fresh and lively introduction to the Shetlands.
THE TRUTH TELLS TWICE BY CHARLIE ALLAN (Birlinn, £16.99) Four stars
CHARLIE Allan has lived the rural Scottish life, man and boy, these seventy years, but his was hardly the stereotypical rustic round. His father a left-wing journalist, his mother a firm believer in progressive education, he spent much of his boyhood on his grandfather's Aberdeenshire farm. There too, however, he was in decidedly eccentric company. Allan grew up with a deep love and understanding of the countryside, but with a detached perspective on country life and its little absurdities: this is a strikingly urbane example of the rural memoir.
The full article contains 412 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
