Right off let me say how grateful I am to Timothy Nunan for the care and intelligence with which he has read and commented on my book. Maybe it is worth saying at the outset that it was not an easy book to write, still less one of those books that write themselves. I found I was engaging more than usually a variety of quite disparate and mutually incomprehending scholarly and quasi-scholarly literatures to a degree that had simply not been true when I tried, for instance, to synthesise the historiography on the Nazi occupation of Europe.