From the back cover: 'No course of action is so mad that some human being will not adopt it', wrote Rebecca West, and the longest part of this remarkable book on postwar trials is her report on the aftermath of Germany's vast national insanity. In 1946 Rebecca West was commissioned by the Daily Telegraph to write three articles on the Nuremberg Trials. She went to Nuremberg that year to hear the closing of the British and US cases and, later, the judgment and sentences. This is her journalism at its most brilliant and evocative: in the eleventh month of the trials she describes Nuremberg as a 'citadel of boredom', tedium pervading every street, every house. Here too is her careful and illuminating study of the process of law itself, her fascination with its human aspects and the collective moral will. In 1949 she went again, writing this time about the rebuilding of Germany, and in 1954 she produced a fascinating theoretical and retrospective study of Nuremberg.

Several other pieces contribute to the book's extraordinary range, including an account of Marshall's treason and two penetrating pieces of crime reportage, 'Mr Setty and Mr Hume', on a murder trial in the fifties, and 'Opera in Greenville', the story of a lynching in the American South. She brings her subjects vividly to life with fascinating biographical and physical detail, and, as in all her work, eloquently explores the nature of good and evil, the forces of life and death. These essays confirm Rebecca West's reputation as on of the most distinguished political journalists of our time.