This lengthy, sober, deeply considered book has already registered strongly in hardback, and rightly so. It begins, inevitably, with the Weimar Republic, one of history's most regrettable failures, and goes on to the "demise of the rule of law" which marked Hitler's path to power and his eventual seizure of it. Much of the political chronicle will be familiar, in fact some of it is over-familiar, but the analysis of Nazism as a new kind of folk religion is clear-headed and exact, without the tendentiousness which so many writers have brought to the subject. Though close on a thousand pages long, the book is packed with fact and analysis and fully justifies its length.