Wish I'd said that - June 7, 2018
"Without the individuals whose names have dominated the preceding pages – Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Konoe and Tojo, Churchill and Roosevelt – the course of history would have been different. But how different? The role of the individual set against the impersonal, external determinants of change is a perpetual conundrum in the interpretation of history.... the individuals at the centre of our enquiry were not ciphers or mere ‘front-men’. They had an input that is not simply reducible to a personalized representational function of such forces.”
Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices