Author:Richard Littlejohn
‘Littlejohn’s large-hearted nostalgia and aggression tempered with humour, remain a necessary tonic.’ The Times
Born when wartime rationing was still in force and children ran free and wild, the world in which Richard Littlejohn grew up feels like it could be another country, let alone another century.
In Littlejohn’s Lost World, he goes in search of his old childhood haunts - and instead finds an England changed beyond recognition. From the covered market that is now a 30-storey Dubai-style tower block to his old primary school, where today twelve different languages are spoken.
From Muffin the Mule to Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival, Littlejohn takes us on a funny and poignant journey to a time and a place we will never see again.
'His is the story of millions of others. If you, like him, feel that world has vanished forever, then you will find it vividly recreated in this captivating memoir.' Daily Mail
His is the story of millions of others. If you, like him, feel that world has vanished forever, then you will find it vividly recreated in this captivating memoir.
—— Daily MailLittlejohn has a sharp, anarchic intelligence, underpinned with an aching nostalgia. His eloquent rage, large-hearted nostalgia, and aggression tempered with humour, remain a necessary tonic.
—— The Timesgloriously evocative
—— Daily MailRiveting childhood memoirs
—— Daily MailA superb collection of essays
—— Daily TelegraphThis is a book that should be read by anyone wishing to understand the modern world.
—— Roger Moorhouse , BBC History MagazineThrough a combination of archive material and interviews, the historian Wendy Lower has unearthed evidence of women who witnessed and even perpetrated atrocities in the Third Reich's eastern-most territories, where most of the murders took place... her stark, often harrowing book is a valuable addition to Holocaust studies
—— Ian Critchley , Sunday TimesUntil now it has been imagined that the Holocaust was perpetrated mainly by men and that female involvement was marginal. However, Ms Lower's research contradicts this.
—— Jewish ChronicleHolocaust historian Professor Wendy Lower has unearthed the complicity of tens of thousands of German women – many more than previously imagined in the sort of mass, monstrous, murderous activities that we would like to think the so-called gentler sex were incapable of
—— Tony Rennell , Daily Mail IrelandWendy Lower's book interweaves the experiences of 13 ordinary women who went to work in the East... for some of these women, violence and murder became part of a rich brew of new-found power... Lower argues, they collectively show the role of women in the Holocaust has been underplayed; obscured by their later stereotypes as heroic 'rubble women' clearing up the mess of Germany's past, victims of Red Army rapists, or flirtatious dolls who entertaned American GIs
—— Ben Shephard , Observer (New Review)The Nazi regime is synonymous with men. The horrors of the Holocaust were, in the main, perpetrated by males. But there were tens of thousands of German women who took part in the Nazis' monstrous and murderous activities on the Eastern Front. The stories are told in Wendy Lower's new book
—— Jewish Telegraphbuilds a picture of a morally lost generation of young women, born into a defeated, post-WW1 Germany, and swept up in the fervour of the Nazi movement
—— Sunday TelegraphLower shifts away from the narrow focus on the few thousand female concentration camp guards who have been at the center of previous studies of female culpability in Nazi crimes and identifies the cluster of professions—nurses, social workers, teachers, office workers—that in addition to family connections brought nearly one-half million women to the German East and into close proximity with pervasive Nazi atrocities. Through the lives of carefully researched individuals, she captures a spectrum of career trajectories and behavior. This is a book that artfully combines the study of gender with the illumination of individual experience.
—— Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in PolandHitler’s Furies is a long overdue and superb addition to the history of the Holocaust. The role of women perpetrators during the Final Solution has been too much glossed over. Wendy Lower’s book provides an important and stunning corrective. It is a significant addition to our understanding of the role of ordinary Germans in the Reich’s genocide.
—— Deborah Lipstadt, author of The Eichmann TrialHitler's Furies is the first book to follow the biographical trajectories of individual women whose youthful exuberance, loyalty to the Führer, ambition, and racism took them to the deadliest sites in German-occupied Europe. Drawing on immensely rich source material, Wendy Lower integrates women perpetrators and accomplices into the social history of the Third Reich, and illuminates them indelibly as a part of post-war East and West German memory that has been, until this book, unmined
—— Claudia Koonz, author of Mothers in the FatherlandStomach-churning
—— Illtyd Harrington , West End ExtraCompelling... Lower's careful research proves that the capacity for indifferent cruelty is not reserved for men – it exists in all of us
—— Renae Merle , Washington PostLower’s impressive analysis is a painful but transfixing read
—— Christopher Hirst , Independent