THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER' These 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century & all that we appear to have forgotten' Observer History does not repeat but it does instruct In the twentieth century European democracies collapsed into fascism Nazism & communism These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people promised to protect them from global existential threats & rejected reason in favour of myth European history shows us that societies can break democracies can fall ethics can collapse & ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances History can familiarise & it can warn Today we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century But when the political order seems imperilled our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny Now is a good time to do so