"The idea that there was an unbridgeable gap between Soviet Communism and National Socialism, which is nowadays so widespread, would have seemed curious at the time. To be sure, there were some in Moscow, and a few more in Berlin, who believed that there must eventually come a reckoning with their “real” enemy. But theirs were minority voices. Many more gladly went along with the idea that the two socialist systems were joined in battle against “decadent Anglo-Saxon liberalism”."

"The two totalitarian systems [USSR Communism and German National-Socialism] traded in all the necessary commodities of war: not just oil and vital chemicals, but arms and ships. They exhibited each other’s cultural achievements, performed each other’s music and films, stressed their joint hostility to Western capitalism."

"It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated."

"The two armies [Red Army and Nazi Army] met at the town of Brest, where the 1918 peace treaty between the Kaiser’s government and Lenin’s revolutionary state had been signed. Soldiers fraternised, exchanging food and tobacco – pre-rolled German cigarettes contrasting favourably against rough Russian papirosi. A joint military parade was staged, the Wehrmacht’s field grey uniforms alongside the olive green of the shoddier Soviets. The two generals, Guderian and Krivoshein, had a slap-up lunch and, as they bade each other farewell, the Soviet commander invited German reporters to visit him in Moscow “after the victory over capitalist Albion”."

"Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed."

"Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote of the "racial trash" - the groups who would necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism."

"The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture."

"What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists."

"Marx's error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity - to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order."

"Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers' Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said."

"Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk."

"On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars."

"Whenever anyone points to the socialist roots of fascism, there are howls of outrage. Yet the people howling the loudest are often the first to claim some ideological link between fascism and conservatism."

"History is reinterpreted, and it is taken as axiomatic that fascism must have been Right-wing, the logic seemingly being that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists were nasty."

"What is happening to this country, for the love of God?"

"I love Turkey. I first traveled there in my early twenties, when I was obsessed by the 1915 Dardanelles campaign. I immediately liked the people — brave, stoical, generous, hospitable and patriotic, if a little inclined to conspiracy theories. I saw Turkey as a model for the region, a successful, Western-oriented Muslim democracy."

"Back in 2014, when no one else was planning how to win the referendum, @DouglasCarswell talked tactics at the @Tate. He said: "We can win in one of two circumstances: a visible failure of the renegotiation, or one of the two main party leaders being neutral." In the event, we got both. Thanks @jeremycorbyn."

"Britain, as a relatively large economy which exports more to non-EU than to EU markets, would be better off trading freely with the single market than belonging to it."

"The EU's single market is a single regulatory regime. Membership of it doesn’t mean that you can sell your products into it: pretty much the whole world can do that. Membership means, rather, that you accept a common set of technical standards, and that you submit yourself to the ultimate jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice."

"That idea that car manufacturers might disinvest after we leave the EU? It's a - what's the word? - oh yes. Lie."

"The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude."

"You cannot spend your way out of a recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we are well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev era apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it's nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by thirty percent. And soon, the voters too will get their chance to say so. They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government"

"We have lived through this mistake for 60 years now."

"If you don't know who Daniel Hannan is, he is of course a boggle-eyed, slap-headed, unpleasant, revolting, heartless, shit-brained, attention-grabbing, fetid excuse for a prick. Sorry, um, sorry, no, no, no, I think I misread that, could you just scroll the autocue back up a bit, I meant he to say Daniel Hannan is of course a boggle-eyed, slap-headed, unpleasant, revolting, heartless, shit-brained, attention-grabbing, fetid excuse for a prick. Oh no, it turns out I got it right the first time."

"The only serious attempt to prioritise growth came from Liz Truss, and prompted outrage from civil servants, commentators and MPs, including many Tories."

"The bureaucracy has ballooned since Brexit – in other words, at precisely the moment when we could be opting out of the needlessly intrusive bits of the EU’s Money Laundering Directive."

"Detaining people for shouting republican slogans, even if they do so in a deliberately coarse and provocative way, is utterly un-British [...] I worry that our police are becoming more authoritarian and — worse — that a section of the public is cheering them on."

"Surely the liberal ideal one is where, instead of obsessing about the ethnic backgrounds of actors, we treat their skin-colour as just one more attribute, like hair-colour or the ability to speak the appropriate accent for the production."

"Race is said to be non-existent, yet our cultural elites rarely seem to think of anything else."

"In an atmosphere when anyone can close down the conversation by saying “I feel uncomfortable”, rational discussion becomes impossible. The empirical method, the basis of Enlightenment civilization, no longer applies."

"If people are determined to be outraged, they will be outraged."

"We threaten to rain fire upon North Korea and Iran, yet we quail before an elderly, impoverished and decrepit Russia. How diminished we are as a civilization."

"Georgia, like Ukraine and Moldova, is a sovereign state. If we accept, in practice, that Russia can alter borders by force, we signal to Moscow that it can violate international norms with impunity. We can hardly then complain if the Kremlin meddles in American elections, or orders murders on British soil."