Just finished reading ...

I worked out tonight that if I can live to be 80 and read a book week, I will be able to read 963 books before I die. Whatever I manage to do this book will stick with me as one of the best I’ve read. It reads like a thriller but is in fact a true story of 20th century horror and justice.

There are four main protagonists: the author’s own grandfather, two Polish lawyers (both Jews who would lose most of their family in the holocaust) and finally one of the most prominent of Nazis to be hanged at Nuremberg. Along the way we encounter dozens of other stories, any one of which could probably be a book in their own right. And we also find out that the word "genocide" did not exist before 1945 but was invented by one of the lawyers who was a crusader for the rights of minorities that could be subject to oppression and wholesale slaughter.

This paragraph concerning the establishment of new Polish borders after the First World War is a striking example of why the 20th century was such a cataclysmic period following the end of empire:

"President Wilson proposed a special treaty to link Poland‘s membership in the league of Nations with a commitment to equal treatment for racial and national minorities. Wilson was supported by France, Britain objected, fearful that similar rights would then be according to other groups, including American Negroes, southern Irish, Flemings and Catalans. The new league of Nations must not protect minorities in all countries, a British official complained, or it would have the right to protect the Chinese in Liverpool, the Roman Catholics in France, the French in Canada, quite apart from more serious problems, such as the Irish. Britain objected to any depletion of sovereignty - the right to treat others as it wished - or international oversight. It took this position even if the price was more injustice and oppression."

That is a long way from modern concepts of equality and diversity ...