Hitler: A Life
PETER LONGERICH
(Oxford University Press, 1,344 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Hitler: Only the World Was Enough
BRENDAN SIMMS
(ALLEN LANE, 704 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Given the endless deluge of books about the Third Reich and the Second World War, you could be forgiven for thinking that biographies of Adolf Hitler were two a penny. Not so. Since Alan Bullock’s pioneering Hitler: A Study in Tyranny – a doorstopper that appeared within a few years of the war’s end – there have been only a handful of serious lives published. The Seventies brought us Joachim Fest’s similarly massive, more psychologically inflected Hitler. In the Nineties, Ian Kershaw delivered up his two-volume structuralist study, Hitler: Hubris and Hitler: Nemesis – a pair of books so big, either of them could be used to knock a V-2 off course. Then, a few years ago, we got Hitler: Ascent, the first volume of Volker Ullrich’s projected double-decker, and a narrative masterpiece that incorporated all the latest scholarship while finding room for some penetrating analysis of Hitler the human being. Now we get two more whoppers – Peter Longerich’s Hitler: A Life and Brendan Simms’ Hitler: Only the World Was Enough. Though they each have their faults, both are essential reading.