To Hell and Back

Europe 1914-1949
Ian Kershaw, Penguin Books 2015

6. Danger Zone

Dictatorship

Mussolini's Italy: The ‘Totalitarian’ Dream

p. 280
No less a person than Winston Churchill lauded [Mussolini], describing him in 1933 as the personification of the Roman genius.

7. Toward the Abyss

The Defeat of the Left

p. 296
The defeat of the Left took place on a continental scale, even if national structures had conditioned is specific nature.

Last Rites of Peace

p. 337
Given notice if the guarantee only hours before it was announced, angry Soviet leaders were more than ever convinced that Chamberlain was playing a long game that would ultimately result in what he wanted: a war between Germany and the Soviet Union.

8. Hell on Earth

Hell on Earth's Many Meanings

Home Fronts

p. 387
Éamon de Valera, little more than a fortnight after expressing his condolences on the death of President Roosevelt, joined an extremely small club of those offering formal condolences to Germany on the news of Hitler's death in 1945.

9. Quiet Transitions in the Dark Decades

Economy and Society: Dynamics of Change

Population

p. 411
Cases of malaria [...] fell in Italy from 234,000 in 1922 to under 50,000 by 1945, and by 1950 the disease had been almost totally eliminated.

p.413

By 1931 about 8 per cent of the French population, some 3.3 million people, were recent immigrants.

p. 415

Equally impersonal are the data showing, on different criteria, that living standards actually rose across Europe during the catastrophic first half of the century — at least for the majority of those whose lives were not lost or ruined by fighting, bombing, despoliation or deliberately murderous policies. Alongside rising life expectancy, income per head increased by over 25 per cent, there was greater purchasing power for the majority, average individual height grew by 4 centimetres (an indicator of better diet as well as more income), and literacy was substantially extended.

History
Marc Girod