Mazarin's Quest: The Congress of Westphalia and the Coming of the Fronde Book

So relentlessly footnoted that establishing any kind of rhythm proved to be an impossibility'but nevertheless wholly absorbing and counter-intuitively illuminating and learnedly cantankerous, a work that, through its dissection of the vast realm of Hitler scholarship and literature'and even more now than in 1997'by means of a topical basis in trying to assess Hitler's legacy, place in history, formative influences, and character, alerted me to the possibility that John Toland might not actually be the last word on Mr. Mustache whilst simultaneously alleviating me of some of the distress engendered within by my marked inability to muster the requisite appreciation for Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism .

Read quite some time ago, and, what with my recent ingestion of another impressive work by the esteemed and educational Professor Lukacs, worth another run through, perhaps bookended either way by the longer, generally better reviewed work by Ron Rosenbaum.