One of the week's highlights was Martin Amis's talk at London's Wiener Library about his Shoah novel, Time's Arrow. Amis, arguing that the Nazi genocide defied explanation, said he was re-reading Sir Martin Gilbert's history of the Holocaust with the same incredulity as when he had first read it 20 years before.

He asked his first questions about the Nazis when seven years old. "Don't worry," his mother had told him. "You are blond, with blue eyes. Hitler would have loved you."