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Back home in Cambridge at last! Today’s photo is of the sculpture in the roll call square (Appellplatz) at Dachau Concentration Camp, which we visited for the first time on the way home, despite having lived just down the road in Munich for nearly four years in the 1980s.

1. As a consequence of that visit, perhaps, here’s the first of two recent pieces by historians for The Atlantic, The Jews Who Voted for Hitler by Timothy W. Ryback https://tinyurl.com/by8bwc74

Naumann (the founder of the League of Nationalist German Jews) drifted right with the rest of German politics in the early 1930s, first abiding and then supporting the extremist, right-wing, rabidly anti-Semitic positions of Adolf Hitler. It is impossible to imagine a more tragically misplaced political calculation than Naumann’s embrace of national socialism. Though the Hitler Juden—or Nazi Jews, as Naumann’s adherents came to be known—represented less than 2 percent of Germany’s half-million Jews, they provide a cautionary tale of members of a minority within a minority who cast their lot with a political leader who openly despised them.

2. And the second, by Anne Applebaum, MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption https://tinyurl.com/v5u784py

“Revolutions are the locomotives of history,” Karl Marx wrote. He was wrong about many things but not about this: In modern times, every major revolutionary movement has sought to change not just the politics of a single country but the international system itself. Napoleon marched the French Revolution across Europe. Lenin and Trotsky believed that their Bolshevik Revolution would succeed only when the Soviet Union was surrounded by other Communist states. Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors built proxy movements to spread their ideology across the Middle East. The clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S. federal government is no different. Wrongly described as “isolationists,” many of its true believers don’t think of themselves as ordinary Republicans who won an election and will temporarily hold power until the next election. Nor are they mere appendages of Trump. They believe they represent something much greater: the vanguard of a movement that will alter not just America, but the world.

3. A review for Literary Review by the economist Howard Davies of A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World by Robin Wigglesworth https://literaryreview.co.uk/betas-in-alphaville

When a country’s outstanding debt approaches 100 per cent of GDP the costs of servicing that debt and rolling it over impose a severe constraint on the public finances. And as the global financial crisis and other recent disruptive episodes (we’re talking about you, Ms Truss) have shown, the risk of financial instability rises.

4. A piece for the socialist magazine Tribune by Lewis Nielsen, Farage is Faltering. The Far Right is Not https://tribunemag.co.uk/2026/09/farage-is-faltering-the-far-right-is-not?utm_source=substack

There was an initial sense of relief when Channel 4 exposed Reform’s backroom sleaze last week. … But just as Reform’s conference was engulfed by scandal, hundreds of masked men demonstrated a different form of far-right capacity on the South Coast. In Dover, protesters dressed in black and moving in formation linked arms across carriageways, obstructing traffic at one of Britain’s most important pieces of border infrastructure. The next evening, around 140 people rescued from a small boat were brought ashore in Portsmouth, and within hours hundreds of anti-migrant agitators had converged on the city. They tried to block coaches carrying the rescued people to processing facilities. Roads were closed, vehicles were damaged and clashes with the police continued into Monday morning. The two mobilisations showed that Reform’s electoral fortunes are not a reliable measure of the wider far right’s strength.

5. And, finally and possibly frustratingly for those of you outside the UK who are finding it difficult to listen to BBC Radio (long-winded and not especially clear guidance from the BBC below), @Rob Drummond and @Michael Rosen discuss the ways people talk in Greater Manchester in Voices of Manchester at 20:00 UK time this coming Sunday, 20^th September https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0031sy1

That BBC guidance https://help.bbc.com/hc/en-us/articles/42652680528659-Update-on-access-to-BBC-Sounds-outside-the-UK