I’m reading Niall Ferguson’s flawed but episodically compelling War of the Worlds. The long section chronicling the industrial genocide of the Holocaust, despite being a twentieth century evil about which I have read widely, required me tonight to close the book and stare out the window of the plane for a while. It was that vivid and overwhelming.
Nevertheless, all the horrors of the last 100 years momentarily aside, Ferguson’s book does contain some wonderful quotes, like this one, by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on May 10, 1941, when told on his way to a movie that Nazi Deputy Party Leader Rudolf Hess had crash-landed a plane in Scotland:
Hess or no Hess, I’m going to see the Marx Brothers.
You can almost hear the bulldog say it.
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