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The role of the police has, from its beginnings, been ambiguous,
even janus-faced. This volume focuses on one of its controversial
aspects by showing how the police have been utilized in the past by
regimes in Europe, the USA and the British Empire to check
political dissent and social unrest. Ideologies such as
anti-Communism emerge as significant influences in both democracies
and dictatorships. And by shedding new light on policing
continuities in twentieth-century Germany and Italy, as well as
Interpol, this volume questions the compatibility of democratic
government and political policing.
The history of a bewilderingly exotic city, rarely written about:
five hundred years of clashing cultures and peoples, from the
glories of Suleiman the Magnificent to its nadir under Nazi
occupation. Salonica is the point where the wonders and horrors of
the Orient and Europe have met over the centuries. Written with a
Pepysian sense of the texture of daily life in the city through the
ages, and with breathtakingly detailed historical research,
Salonica evokes the sights, smells, habits, songs and responses of
a unique city and its inhabitants. The history of Salonica is one
of forgotten alternatives and wrong choices, of identities assumed
and discarded. For centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims have
succeeded each other in ascendancy, each people intent on erasing
the presence of their predecessors, and the result is a city of
extraordinarily rich cultural traditions and memories of extreme
violence and genocide, one that sits on the overlapping hinterlands
of both Europe and the East. Mark Mazower has written a work of
astonishing depth and originality about this remarkable city.
Magnificently researched and beautifully written, it is more than a
book about a place; it studies in detail the way in which three
great faiths and peoples have inhabited the same territory, and how
smooth transitions and adaptations have been interwoven with
violent endings and new beginnings.
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize * One of The Economist's top
history books of the year From one of our leading historians, an
important new history of the Greek War of Independence-the ultimate
worldwide liberal cause celebre of the age of Byron, Europe's first
nationalist uprising, and the beginning of the downward spiral of
the Ottoman Empire-published two hundred years after its outbreak
As Mark Mazower shows us in his enthralling and definitive new
account, myths about the Greek War of Independence outpaced the
facts from the very beginning, and for good reason. This was an
unlikely cause, against long odds, a disorganized collection of
Greek patriots up against what was still one of the most storied
empires in the world, the Ottomans. The revolutionaries needed all
the help they could get. And they got it as Europeans and Americans
embraced the idea that the heirs to ancient Greece, the wellspring
of Western civilization, were fighting for their freedom against
the proverbial Eastern despot, the Turkish sultan. This was
Christianity versus Islam, now given urgency by new ideas about the
nation-state and democracy that were shaking up the old order. Lord
Byron is only the most famous of the combatants who went to Greece
to fight and die-along with many more who followed events
passionately and supported the cause through art, music, and
humanitarian aid. To many who did go, it was a rude awakening to
find that the Greeks were a far cry from their illustrious
forebears, and were often hard to tell apart from the Ottomans.
Mazower does full justice to the realities on the ground as a
revolutionary conspiracy triggered outright rebellion, and a
fraying and distracted Ottoman leadership first missed the plot and
then overreacted disastrously. He shows how and why ethnic
cleansing commenced almost immediately on both sides. By the time
the dust settled, Greece was free, and Europe was changed forever.
It was a victory for a completely new kind of
politics-international in its range and affiliations, popular in
its origins, romantic in sentiment, and radical in its goals. It
was here on the very edge of Europe that the first successful
revolution took place in which a people claimed liberty for
themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it,
transforming diplomatic norms and the direction of European
politics forever, and inaugurating a new world of nation-states,
the world in which we still live.
Twentieth-century Southeastern Europe endured three, separate
decades of international and civil war, and was marred in forced
migration and wrenching systematic changes. This book is the result
of a year-long project by the Open Society Institute to examine and
reappraise this tumultuous century. A cohort of young scholars with
backgrounds in history, anthropology, political science, and
comparative literature were brought together for this undertaking.
The studies invite attention to fascism, socialism, and liberalism
as well as nationalism and Communism. While most chapters deal with
war and confrontation, they focus rather on the remembrance of such
conflicts in shaping today's ideology and national identity.
The great depression of the inter-war years was the most profound
shock ever to strike the world economy, and is widely held to have
led directly to the collapse of parliamentary democracy in many
countries. This scholarly study of Greece in the period between the
two world wars, however, demonstrates that there was no simple
correlation between economic and political crisis. How was an
underdeveloped country such as Greece able to recover so fast from
this unprecedented economic crisis? Mark Mazower examines the
complex processes involved, basing his analysis on detailed
statistical research. Recovery, like crisis, threatened prevailing
notions of the relationship between state and society, and
undermined traditional ruling elites. Dr Mazower's challenging
study makes an important contribution not only to the
historiography of modern Greece, but also to our understanding of
the interrelationship between politics, economics, and the
democratic process.
'Not Le Carre, not Deighton, not Ludlum have surpassed the
intelligence, authenticity or engrossing storytelling that
established The Mask of Dimitrios as the best of its kind' The
Times English crime novelist Charles Latimer is travelling in
Istanbul when he makes the acquaintance of Turkish police inspector
Colonel Haki. It is from him that he first hears of the mysterious
Dimitrios - an infamous master criminal, long wanted by the law,
whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. Fascinated by
the story, Latimer decides to retrace Dimitrios' steps across
Europe to gather material for a new book. But, as he gradually
discovers more about his subject's shadowy history, fascination
tips over into obsession. And, in entering Dimitrios' criminal
underworld, Latimer realizes that his own life may be on the line.
'A gripping thriller ... still fresh as new' Guardian
Throughout history, the Balkans have been a crossroads, a zone of endless military, cultural, and economic mixing and clashing between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. In this highly acclaimed short history, Mark Mazower sheds light on what has been called the tinderbox of Europe, whose troubles have ignited wider wars for hundreds of years. Focusing on events from the emergence of the nation-state onward, The Balkans reveals with piercing clarity the historical roots of current conflicts and gives a landmark reassessment of the region’s history, from the world wars and the Cold War to the collapse of communism, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the continuing search for stability in southeastern Europe.
At the end of the 20th century people spoke as if the Balkans had
plagued Europe forever. But 200 years earlier, the Balkans did not
exist. It was not the Balkans but the "Rumeli" that the Ottomans
ruled, the formerly Roman lands that they had conquered from
Byzantium, together with its Christian inhabitants. In this account
of the region Mark Mazower dispels current Western cliches and
replaces stereotypes with a vivid account of how mountains, empires
and religions have shaped its inhabitants' lives. As a bridge
between Europe and Asia it has been exposed to a constant incursion
of nomadic peoples across the centuries. Mazower's narrative ranges
broadly both in time and in space, treating the former Turkish
domains in Europe as part of a common if complex historical
inheritance.
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The Mask of Dimitrios
Eric Ambler; Introduction by Mark Mazower
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R296
R240
Discovery Miles 2 400
Save R56 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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English crime novelist Charles Latimer is travelling in Istanbul
when he makes the acquaintance of Turkish police inspector Colonel
Haki. It is from him that he first hears of the mysterious
Dimitrios - an infamous master criminal, long wanted by the law,
whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. Fascinated by
the story, Latimer decides to retrace Dimitrios' steps across
Europe to gather material for a new book. But, as he gradually
discovers more about his subject's shadowy history, fascination
tips over into obsession. And, in entering Dimitrios' criminal
underworld, Latimer realizes that his own life may be on the line.
'A gripping thriller ... still fresh as new' Guardian
Dark Continent is a searching history of Europe's most brutal century. Stripping away the comforting myths and illusions that we have grown up with since the Second World War, Mark Mazower presents an unflinching account of a continent locked in a finely balanced struggle between tolerance and racial extermination, imperial ambition and national self-determination, liberty and the tyrannies of Right and Left.
A NEW STATESMAN AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021
A thrilling history of the revolutionary birth of modern Greece
from 'the preeminent historian of a generation' (Misha Glenny) In
the exhausted, repressive years that followed Napoleon's defeat in
1815, there was one cause that came to galvanize countless
individuals across Europe and the United States: freedom for
Greece. Mark Mazower's wonderful new book recreates one of the most
compelling, unlikely and significant events in the story of modern
Europe. In the face of near impossible odds, the people of the
villages, valleys and islands of Greece rose up against Sultan
Mahmud II and took on the might of the imperial Ottoman armed
forces, its Turkish cavalrymen, Albanian foot soldiers and the
fearsome Egyptians. Despite the most terrible disasters, they held
on until military intervention by Russia, France and Britain
finally secured the kingdom of Greece. Mazower brilliantly brings
together the different strands of the story. He takes us into the
minds of revolutionary conspirators and the terrors of besieged
towns, the stories of itinerant priests, sailors and slaves,
ambiguous heroes and defenceless women and children struggling to
stay alive amid a conflict of extraordinary brutality. Ranging
across the Eastern Mediterranean and far beyond, he explores the
central place of the struggle in the making of Romanticism and a
new kind of politics that had volunteers flocking from across
Europe to die in support of the Greeks. A story of how statesmen
came to terms with an even more powerful force than themselves -
the force of nationalism - this is above all a book about how
people decided to see their world differently and, at an often
terrible cost to themselves and their families, changed history.
'Exquisite, impressive' The Times 'Superbly subtle and thorough'
Daily Telegraph
Draw ing on an unprecedented range and variety of original
research, "Hitler's Empire" sheds new light on how the Nazis
designed, maintained, and lost their European dominion?and offers a
chilling vision of what the world would have become had they won
the war. Mark Mazower forces us to set aside timeworn opinions of
the Third Reich, and instead shows how the party drew inspiration
for its imperial expansion from America and Great Britain. Yet the
Nazis? lack of political sophistication left them unequal to the
task of ruling what their armies had conquered, despite a shocking
level of cooperation from the overwhelmed countries. A work as
authoritative as it is unique, "Hitler's Empire" is a
surprising?and controversial? new appraisal of the Third Reich's
rise and ultimate fall.
A majestic narrative reckoning with the forces that have shaped the
nature and destiny of the world's governing institutions
The story of global cooperation is a tale of dreamers goading us
to find common cause in remedying humanity's worst problems. But
international institutions are also tools for the powers that be to
advance their own interests. Mark Mazower's "Governing the World"
tells the epic, two-hundred-year story of that inevitable
tension--the unstable and often surprising alchemy between ideas
and power. From the rubble of the Napoleonic empire in the
nineteenth century through the birth of the League of Nations and
the United Nations in the twentieth century to the dominance of
global finance at the turn of the millennium, Mazower masterfully
explores the current era of international life as Western dominance
wanes and a new global balance of powers emerges.
This gripping and richly illustrated account of wartime Greece
explores the impact of the Nazi Occupation upon the lives and
values of ordinary people. The first full account of the experience
of occupation, it offers a vividly human picture of resistance
fighters and black marketeers, teenage German conscripts and
Gestapo officers, Jews and starving villagers. "Fascinating. . . .
[Mazower] succeeds in getting under the skin of the occupation. . .
. [This book] conjures up, in vivid detail, life under an
occupation that had shattered old certainties and replaced them
with painful choices, cynical compromises, and hopes undercut by
the daily death toll." -Mark Almond, New York Times "A vivid
picture of the German occupier's mind and actions. . . . Mazower's
arguments are always fair." -Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book
Review "A superb book on the horrors afflicting wartime Greece. . .
. [Mazower] has done vast archival research and emerged with a
gripping, readable and human account, setting every moment of a
tragic period in appropriate context." -Fritz Stern, Foreign
Affairs "[A] sensitive, illuminating and richly textured account of
painful, complex experience." -Richard Overy, Observer Mark Mazower
is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London,
and author of Dark Continent.
Primo Levi was among the greatest witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In this gripping novel, based on a true story, he reveals the extraordinary lives of the Russian, Polish and Jewish partisans trapped behind enemy lines during the Second World War. Wracked by fear, hunger and fierce rivalries, they link up, fall apart, struggle to stay alive and to sabotage the efforts of the all-powerful German army. A compelling tale of action, resistance and epic adventure, it also reveals Levi's characteristic compassion and deep insight into the moral dilemmas of total war. It ranks alongside The Periodic Table and If This Is A Man as one of the rare authentic masterpieces of our times.
"A useful, important book that reminds us, at the right time, how hard [European unity] has been, and how much care must be taken to avoid the terrible old temptations." --Los Angeles Times
Dark Continent provides an alternative history of the twentieth century, one in which the triumph of democracy was anything but a forgone conclusion and fascism and communism provided rival political solutions that battled and sometimes triumphed in an effort to determine the course the continent would take.
Mark Mazower strips away myths that have comforted us since World War II, revealing Europe as an entity constantly engaged in a bloody project of self-invention. Here is a history not of inevitable victories and forward marches, but of narrow squeaks and unexpected twists, where townships boast a bronze of Mussolini on horseback one moment, only to melt it down and recast it as a pair of noble partisans the next. Unflinching, intelligent, Dark Continent provides a provocative vision of Europ's past, present, and future-and confirms Mark Mazower as a historian of valuable gifts.
Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire is a provocative account of the rise
and fall of Nazi Europe by one of Britain's leading historians.
Hitler's empire was the largest, most brutal and most ambitious
reshaping of Europe in history. Inspired by the imperial legacy of
those such as the British, the Third Reich cast its shadow from the
Channel Islands to the Caucasus and ruled hundreds of millions.
Yet, as Mark Mazower's groundbreaking new account shows, it was an
empire built on an illusion. From Hitler's plans for vast motorways
crossing an ethnically cleansed Russian steppe, to dreams of a
German super-economy rivalling America's, Mazower reveals the
lethal fusion of mass murder, modern managerialism and colossal
incompetence that underpinned the Nazi New Order. Ultimately
Hitler's empire ended up consuming its own, leaving destruction in
its wake and finishing not just with the downfall of Germany, but
an entire continent. 'Remarkable ... provocative ... an important
new book' Adam Tooze, Sunday Telegraph 'A stunning survey ...
breaks new ground' Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Telegraph Books of the
Year 'A first-class account' Richard Overy, Literary Review
'Brilliant ... a must for anyone who has a serious interest in the
dreadful Third Reich' Justin Cartwright, Spectator 'Exposes the
intellectual bankruptcy of the enterprise with forensic skill and
wit' Christopher Silvester, Daily Express Mark Mazower is the
author of Inside Hitler's Greece, Dark Continent: Europe's
Twentieth Century, The Balkans - which won the Wolfson Prize for
History - and Salonika: City of Ghosts, which won both the Runciman
Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He has taught at the University of
Sussex, Princeton University and Birkbeck College, University of
London. He is now Professor of History at Columbia University.
SHORLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018 NEW STATESMAN AND EVENING
STANDARD BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 'Brilliant ... a staggering story'
Robert Fox, Evening Standard, Books of the Year 'Fascinating, vast
and rich ... a dramatic family memoir' Guardian Uncovering his
family's remarkable and moving stories, Mark Mazower recounts the
sacrifices and silences that marked a generation and their
descendants. It was a family that fate drove into the siege of
Stalingrad, the Vilna ghetto, occupied Paris, and even into the
ranks of the Wehrmacht. His British father was the lucky one, the
son of Russian Jewish emigrants who settled in London after
escaping the civil war and revolution. Max, the grandfather, had
started out as a socialist and manned the barricades against
tsarist troops, but never spoke of it. His wife, Frouma, came from
a family ravaged by the Great Terror yet somehow making their way
in Soviet society. In the centenary of the Russian Revolution, What
You Did Not Tell recounts a brand of socialism erased from memory -
humanistic, impassioned, and broad-ranging in its sympathies. But
it also explores the unexpected happiness that may await history's
losers, the power of friendship, and the love of place that allowed
Max and Frouma's son to call England home.
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