We live amid alarming fractures in the public understanding of our identities, our collective needs and our perils. Alec Ryrie’s little book of contemporary history manages to be both exhilarating and comforting, based on his rare skill in bringing an historian’s cool gaze on our anxious world to assess its ills, and with due modesty to offer some remedial ways forward. - Diarmaid MacCulloch, Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church, University of OxfordRapidly, provocatively, this book shakes the history of the last few decades into a new and persuasive shape, and asks the question we all need to answer: how shall we orient ourselves, how shall we understand good and evil, when the old taboos are breaking down, and the horrors of the past are losing their strength as guard-rails? - Francis Spufford, author of Red Plenty and the Booker Prize-longlisted Light PerpetualWith his lissome prose, Alec Ryrie is a brilliant guide in the best of the essayist tradition, who empowers us to face the formidable moral questions of our age not as victims but through critical self-examination, ethical reflection, and compassionate action. Who are we? The appeal to self-awareness is neither otherworldly nor moralizing. Rather, like the great Montaigne, Ryrie meets us in the middle of his and our lives, offering rich and humane historical reflections as wisdom in our consumerist, perpetually online, and post-truth realities. This is an extraordinary book with which you don't need to be in full agreement to emerge radically transformed into a more enlightened and charitable person in a fraught age. - Bruce Gordon, Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Yale Divinity SchoolA brilliant exposition of Hitler’s role as the embodiment of evil in the collective imagination of the West – and of what may happen as it starts to fade. - Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind[The Age of Hitler] offers a wealth of reflections on the topics of historical periodization, historical memory, and the historical foundations of postwar Western morality. It also offers a thoughtful analysis of why those foundations are crumbling and what the consequences might be for Western cultural and spiritual life in the coming years . . . Ryrie is to be commended for encouraging dialogue between progressive secularists and conservative traditionalists. - Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Los Angeles Review of BooksThis is a bold and interesting thesis, and it is presented with a wealth of comments on contentious topics confronting politicians and church leaders alike. It also sketches a vision of how secularists and religious traditionalists might learn from one another and together shape a less divided society. - Canon Robin Gill, Church TimesAs Ryrie sees it, Hitler was for the second half of the twentieth century and on into the next, what Jesus had been for previous generations: the centre of the moral wheel, around which our ethical instincts turned. Of course, whereas Jesus shaped our moral instincts through positive example, Hitler shaped them by defining what we were against . . . Ryrie’s study of the shaping of postwar values is compelling and expertly written. As a commentary on the moral condition of our age and what is at stake, it could hardly be bettered. - Literary ReviewProvocative . . . Presented in a light yet not unserious tone, this well-paced investigation of what underpins modern morality is worth grappling with. - Publishers WeeklyThe West has long agreed: Hitler is all we aspire not to be. But Ryrie’s new book shows this waning consensus can’t uphold all our public ethics. - Christianity TodayA very good book . . . It is erudite, beautifully written, with witty anecdotes and penetrating observations in all the right places. It tells us that we are moving from an age of moral certitudes into one where it is increasingly permissible for world leaders to commit acts of horrific barbarism and to behave like small children, and it gives practical suggestions for how best to survive this moment of historic change. The argument builds methodically, and it leaves one feeling both informed and edified. - Premier ChristianityRyrie’s The Age of Hitler alerts us that the old taboos that kept the demonsat bay in Western societies for the past eighty years are no longer holding . . . According to Ryrie, this development is not wholly unwelcome. For too long, Western politics has been defined by its devils. We know what we fear and want to avoid at all costs: the second coming of Hitler, racist fascism, anti-Semitism, and so forth. On these we all agree – or at least we did until very recently. We struggle to find common loves around which to rally, and we are left only with common fears and hates . . . Ryrie doesn’t want us to lose the insights and values gained during the Age of Hitler; he just thinksthey need to rest on the firmer foundations of a richer story. - WORLD
