Sir Ian Kershaw
Ian Kershaw at Leipzig Book Fair 2012
Born	(1943-04-29) 29 April 1943 (age 69) Oldham, United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Occupation	Historian
Known for	For his studies in German social history, especially Alltagsgeschichte and for advancing the "Working Towards the Führer" concept

Sir Ian Kershaw, FBA (born 29 April 1943) is a British historian of 20th-century Germany whose work has chiefly focused on the period of the Third Reich. He is regarded by many as one of the world's leading experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his monumental biography of Hitler, which has been called "soberly objective."^[1]

He was the leading disciple of the late West German historian Martin Broszat, and (until his retirement) professor at the University of Sheffield. Kershaw has called Broszat an "inspirational mentor" who did much to shape his understanding of National Socialist Germany.^[2] Kershaw served as historical adviser on numerous BBC documentaries, notably The Nazis: A Warning From History and War of the Century. He taught a module entitled 'Germans against Hitler'.^[3]

His wife Dame Betty Kershaw was a Dean at Sheffield.

Background[link]

Kershaw was born into a working-class Catholic family in Oldham, Lancashire, England, to parents Joseph Kershaw and Alice Robinson. He was educated at the local grammar school.^[4] During his youth, he became fascinated with the early modern and medieval periods when England was Catholic.^[4] Educated at St Bede's College, Manchester, the University of Liverpool (BA) and Merton College, Oxford (D.Phil), Kershaw was originally trained as a medievalist but turned to the study of modern German social history in the 1970s. At first, Kershaw was mainly concerned with the economic history of Bolton Abbey. As a Lecturer in Medieval History at Manchester, Kershaw learned German to study the German peasantry in the Middle Ages.^[4] In 1972, Kershaw visited Bavaria and was shocked to hear the views of an old man he met in a Munich cafe who told him: "You English were so foolish. If only you had sided with us. Together we could have defeated Bolshevism and ruled the earth!", adding in for good measure that "The Jew is a louse!"^[4] As a result of this incident, Kershaw became keen to learn how and why ordinary people in Germany could support National Socialism.^[4]

Bavaria Project[link]

In 1975, Kershaw joined Martin Broszat's "Bavaria Project".^[4] During his work, Broszat encouraged Kershaw to examine how ordinary people viewed Hitler.^[4] As a result of his work in the 1970s on Broszat's "Bavaria Project", Kershaw wrote his first book on the Third Reich, The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich which was first published in German in 1980 as Der Hitler-Mythos: Volksmeinung und Propaganda im Dritten Reich.^[4] This book examined the "Hitler cult" in Germany, how it was developed by Joseph Goebbels, what social groups the Hitler Myth appealed to and how it rose and fell.

Also arising from the "Bavaria Project" and Kershaw's work in the field of Alltagsgeschichte was Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich. In this 1983 book, Kershaw examined the experience of the Third Reich at the grass-roots in Bavaria. Kershaw showed how ordinary people reacted to the Nazi dictatorship, looking at how people conformed to the regime and to the extent and limits of dissent. Kershaw described his subject as ordinary Bavarians, or as he referred to:

"the muddled majority, neither full-hearted Nazis nor outright opponents, whose attitudes at one and the same time betray signs of Nazi ideological penetration and yet show the clear limits of propaganda manipulation".^[5]

Kershaw went on to write in his preface:

"I should like to think that had I been around at the time I would have been a convinced anti-Nazi engaged in the underground resistance fight. However, I know really that I would have been as confused and felt as helpless as most of the people I am writing about".^[6]

Kershaw argued that Goebbels failed to create the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) of Nazi propaganda, and that most Bavarians were far more interested in their day to day lives than in politics during the Third Reich.^[7] Kershaw concluded that the majority of Bavarians were either anti-Semitic or more commonly simply did not care about what was happening to the Jews.^[8] Kershaw also concluded that there was a fundamental difference between the anti-Semitism of the majority of ordinary people, who disliked Jews and were much colored by traditional Catholic prejudices, and the ideological and far more radical völkische anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party, who hated Jews.^[8] Kershaw found that the majority of Bavarians disapproved of the violence of Kristallnacht pogrom, and that despite the efforts of the Nazis, continued to maintain social relations with the members of the Bavarian Jewish community.^[6] Kershaw documented numerous campaigns on the part of the Nazi Party to increase anti-Semitic hatred, and noted that the overwhelming majority of anti-Semitic activities in Bavaria were the work of a small number of committed Nazi Party members.^[6] Overall, Kershaw noted that the popular mood towards Jews was indifference to their fate.^[6] Kershaw argued that during World War II, most Bavarians were vaguely aware of the Holocaust, but were vastly more concerned about and interested in the war than about the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".^[6] Kershaw made the notable claim that:

"the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference".^[9][10]

By this, Kershaw meant the progress leading up to Auschwitz was motivated by anti-Semitism of the most vicious kind held by the Nazi elite, but it took place in a context where the majority of German public opinion was completely indifferent to what was happening.

Kershaw’s assessment that most Bavarians, and by implication Germans were “indifferent” to the Shoah faced criticism from the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka and the Canadian historian Michael Kater. Kater contended that Kershaw downplayed the extent of popular anti-Semitism, and that though admitting that most of the “spontaneous” anti-Semitic actions of Nazi Germany were staged, argued that because these actions involved substantial numbers of Germans, it is wrong to see the extreme anti-Semitism of the Nazis as coming solely from above.^[11] Kulka argued that most Germans were more anti-Semitic than Kershaw portrayed them in Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, and that rather than “indifference” argued that “passive complicity” would be a better term to describe the reaction of the German people to the Shoah.^[12]

[edit] The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation

In 1985, Kershaw published a book on the historiography of Nazi Germany entitled The Nazi Dictatorship, in which Kershaw reflected on the problems in historiography of the Nazi era.^[13] Kershaw noted the huge disparity of often incompatible views about the Third Reich such as the debate between:

• those who see the Nazi period as the culmination of Deutschtum (Germanism), and Marxists who see National Socialism as the culmination of capitalism
• those who argue for a Sonderweg, and those who argue against the Sonderweg concept
• those who see National Socialism as a type of totalitarianism, and those who see it as a type of fascism
• those historians who favour a “functionalist” interpretation with the emphasis on the German bureaucracy and the Holocaust as an ad hoc process, and those who favour an “intentionist” interpretation with the focus on Hitler and the argument that the Holocaust had been something planned from early on in Hitler's political career.^[14]

As Kershaw noted, these divergent interpretations such as the differences between the functionalist view of the Holocaust as caused by a process and the intentionist view of the Holocaust as caused by a plan are not easily reconciled, and that there was in his opinion the need for a guide to explain the complex historiography surrounding these issues.^[14] Likewise, if one accepts the Marxist view of National Socialism as the culmination of capitalism, then the Nazi phenomenon is universal, and fascism can come to power in any society where capitalism is the dominant economic system, whereas the view of National Socialism as the culmination of Deutschtum means that the Nazi phenomenon is local and particular only to Germany. For Kershaw, any historian writing about the period had to take account of the "historical-philosophical", "political-ideological" and moral problems associated with the period, which thus poses special challenges for the historian.^[13] In The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw surveyed the historical literature, and offered his own assessment of the pros and cons of the various approaches.^[13] In a 2008 interview, Kershaw lists as his major intellectual influences Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, Alan Milward, Timothy Mason, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, William Carr and Jeremy Noakes.^[15] In the same interview, Kershaw expressed strong approval of Mason's "Primacy of Politics" concept, in which it was German Big Business that served the Nazi regime rather than the other way around, against the orthodox Marxist "Primacy of Economics" concept.^[15] Despite his praise and admiration for Mason, in the 2000 edition of The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw was highly sceptical of Mason's "Flight into War" theory of an economic crisis in 1939 forcing the Nazi regime into war.^[16]

In the Historikerstreit (Historians' Dispute) of 1986 to 1989, Kershaw followed Broszat in criticizing the work and views of Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer, Joachim Fest and Klaus Hildebrand, all of whom Kershaw saw as German apologists attempting to white-wash the German past in various ways. In the 1989 edition of The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw devoted an entire chapter towards rebutting the views of Nolte, Hillgruber, Fest, Hildebrand and Stürmer. In regard to the debate between those who regard National Socialism as a type of totalitarianism (and thus having more in common with the Soviet Union) versus those who regard Nazism as a type of fascism (and thus having more in common with Fascist Italy), Kershaw, though feeling that the totalitarianism approach is not without value, has argued that in essence, Nazism should be viewed as a type of fascism, albeit fascism of a very radical type.^[17] Writing of the Sonderweg debate, Kershaw finds the moderate Sonderweg approach of Jürgen Kocka the most satisfactory historical explanation for why the Third Reich occurred.^[18] In the 2000 edition of The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw wrote he considered Gerhard Ritter's claim that one “madman” (i.e. Hitler) single-handedy caused World War II to that of a German apologist, and that he found the historical approach of Ritter’s arch-enemy Fritz Fischer to be a far better way of understanding German history.^[19] Along the same lines, Kershaw criticized as German apologetics the 1946 statement by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke that National Socialism was just a particularly unfortunate Betriebsunfall (industrial accident) of history.^[19] Kershaw was later in a 2003 essay to criticize both Ritter and Meinecke as German apologists who either through the Betriebsunfall theory and by blaming everything upon Hitler were seeking to white-wash the German past.^[2] Writing of the work of the German historian Rainer Zitelmann, Kershaw has argued that Zitelmann has elevated what were merely secondary considerations in Hitler's remarks to the primary level, and that Zitelmann has not offered a clear definition of what he means by "modernization".^[20]

In regards to the Nazi foreign policy debate between “globalists” such as Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, Jochen Thies, Gunter Moltman and Gerhard Weinberg, who argue that Germany aimed at world conquest, and the "continentalists” such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Eberhard Jäckel, and Axel Kuhn, who argue that Germany aimed only at the conquest of Europe,^[21] Kershaw tends towards the “continentalist” position.^[22] Kershaw agrees with the thesis that Hitler did formulate a programme for foreign policy centring around an alliance with Britain to achieve the destruction of the Soviet Union, but has argued that a British lack in interest doomed the project, thus leading to the situation in 1939, where Hitler went to war with Britain, the country he wanted as an ally, as an enemy, and the country he wanted as an enemy, the Soviet Union, as his ally.^[23] At the same time, Kershaw sees considerable merit in the work of such historians as Timothy Mason, Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat and Wolfgang Schieder, who argue that Hitler had no “programme” in foreign policy, and instead contend that his foreign policy was simply a kneejerk reaction to domestic pressures in the economy and his need to maintain his popularity.^[24]

In regards to the historical debates about Widerstand (resistance) in German society, Kershaw has argued that there are two approaches to the question, one of which he calls the fundamentalist (dealing with those committed to overthrowing the Nazi regime) and the societal (dealing with forms of dissent in "everyday life").^[25] In Kershaw's viewpoint, Broszat's Resistenz (immunity) concept works well in an Alltagsgeschichte approach, but works less well in the field of high politics, and moreover by focusing only on the "effect" of one's actions, fails to consider the crucial element of the "intention" behind one's actions.^[26] Kershaw has argued that the term Widerstand should be used only for those working for the total overthrow of the Nazi system, and those engaging in behavior which was counter to the regime's wishes without seeking to overthrow the regime should be included under the terms opposition and dissent, depending upon their motives and actions.^[27] In Kershaw's opinion, there were three bands ranging from dissent to opposition to resistance.^[28] Kershaw has used the Edelweiss Pirates as an example of whose behavior initially fell under dissent, and who advanced from there to opposition and finally to resistance.^[29] In Kershaw's view, there was much dissent and opposition within German society, but outside of the working-class, very little resistance.^[30] Though Kershaw has argued that the Resistenz concept has much merit, he concluded that the Nazi regime had a broad basis of support and it is correct to speak of "resistance without the people".^[31]

Regarding the debate in the late 1980s between Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer over Broszat's call for the "historicization" of National Socialism, Kershaw wrote that he agreed with Friedländer that the Nazi period could not be treated as a "normal" period of history, but he felt that historians should approach the Nazi period as they would any other period of history.^[32] In support of Broszat, Kershaw wrote that an Alltagsgeschichte approach to German history, provided that it did not lose sight of Nazi crimes, had much to offer as a way of understanding how those crimes occurred.^[32]

During the "Goldhagen Controversy" of 1996, Kershaw took the view that his friend, Hans Mommsen, had "destroyed" Daniel Goldhagen's arguments about a culture of "eliminationist antisemitism" in Germany during their frequent debates on German TV.^[33] Kershaw wrote that he agreed with Eberhard Jäckel's assessment that Hitler's Willing Executioners was "simply a bad book".^[34] Through Kershaw had little positive to say about Goldhagen, he wrote that he felt that Norman Finkelstein had attacked Goldhagen in an over-the-top manner that did little to help historical understanding.^[35] However, Kershaw later went on to recommend Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn's extremely critical assessment of Goldhagen's book, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth; stating that "Finkelstein and Birn provide a devastating critique of Daniel Goldhagen's simplistic and misleading interpretation of the Holocaust. Their contribution to the debate is, in my view, indispensable."

Structuralist views[link]

Like Broszat, Kershaw sees the structures of the Nazi state as far more important than the personality of Hitler (or any other individual for that matter) as explanation for the way Nazi Germany developed. In particular, Kershaw subscribes to the view argued by Broszat and the German historian Hans Mommsen that Nazi Germany was a chaotic collection of rival bureaucracies in perpetual power struggles with each other. In Kershaw's view, the Nazi dictatorship was not a totalitarian monolith, but rather comprised an unstable coalition of several blocs in a "power cartel" comprising the NSDAP, big business, the German state bureaucracy, the Army and SS/police agencies (and moreover, each of the “power blocs” in turn were divided into several factions).^[36] In Kershaw's opinion, the more "radical" blocs such as the SS/police and the Nazi Party gained increasing ascendency over the other blocs after the 1936 economic crisis, and then onwards increased their power at the expense of the other blocs.^[37]

Adolf Hitler, topic of several books of Kershaw

For Kershaw, the real significance of Hitler lies not in the dictator himself, but rather in the German people's perception of him.^[38] In his biography of Hitler, Kershaw presented him as the ultimate “unperson”; a boring, pedestrian man devoid of even the “negative greatness” attributed to him by Joachim Fest.^[39] Kershaw has no time for the Great Man theory of history and has criticised those who seek to explain everything that happened in the Third Reich as the result of Hitler’s will and intentions.^[40] Kershaw has argued that it is absurd to seek to explain German history in the Nazi era solely through Hitler as Germany had sixty-eight million people during the Third Reich, and to seek to explain the fate of sixty-eight million people solely though the prism of one man is in Kershaw’s opinion a flawed position.^[41] Kershaw wrote about the problems of an excessive focus on Hitler that "...even the best biographies have seemed at times in danger of elevating Hitler's personal power to a level where the history of Germany between 1933 and 1945 becomes reduced to little more than an expression of the dictator's will".^[41] Kershaw has a low opinion of those who seek to provide "personalized" theories about the Holocaust and/or World War II as due to some defect, medical or otherwise in Hitler.^[8] In his 2000 edition of The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw quoted with approval the dismissive remarks made by the German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler in 1980 about such theories. Wehler wrote:

"Does our understanding of National Socialist policies really depend on whether Hitler had only one testicle?...Perhaps the Führer had three, which made things difficult for him, who knows?...Even if Hitler could be regarded irrefutably as a sado-masochist, which scientific interest does that further?...Does the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" thus become more easily understandable or the "twisted road to Auschwitz" become the one-way street of a psychopath in power?"^[8]

Kershaw shares Wehler's opinion, that, besides the problem that such theories about Hitler's medical condition were extremely difficult to prove, they had the effect of personalizing the phenomena of Nazi Germany by more or less attributing everything that happened in the Third Reich to one flawed individual.^[8]

Kershaw’s biography of Hitler is an examination of Hitler’s power; how he obtained it and how he maintained it.^[42] Following up on ideas that he had first introduced in a 1991 book about Hitler, Kershaw has argued that Hitler's leadership is a model example of Max Weber's theory of Charismatic leadership.^[13][43] Kershaw's 1991 book Hitler: A Profile in Power marked a change for Kershaw from writing about how people viewed Hitler to about Hitler himself.^[13] In his two-volume biography of Hitler published in 1998 and 2000, Kershaw stated "What I tried to do was to embed Hitler into the social and political context that I had already studied".^[13] Kershaw finds the picture of Hitler as a “mountebank” (opportunistic adventurer) in Alan Bullock's biography unsatisfactory, and Joachim Fest's quest to determine how "great" Hitler was senseless.^[44] In a wider sense, Kershaw sees the Nazi regime as part of a broader crisis which afflicted European society from 1914 to 1945.^[45] Through in disagreement with many of their claims (especially Nolte’s), Kershaw’s concept of a “Second Thirty Years’ War” reflects many similarities with Ernst Nolte, A. J. P. Taylor and Arno J. Mayer who have also advanced the concept of a “Thirty Years’ Crisis” to explain European history between 1914–1945.^[45]

In the Functionalism versus intentionalism debate, Kershaw has argued for a synthesis of the two schools, though Kershaw leans towards the functionalist school. Despite some disagreements, Kerhaw has called Mommsen a “good personal friend” and an “important further vital stimulus to my own work on Nazism".^[2] Kershaw has argued in his two-volume biography of Hitler that Hitler did play a decisive role in the development of policies of genocide, but also argued that many of the measures that led to the Holocaust were undertaken by many lower-ranking officials without direct orders from Hitler in the expectation that such steps would win them favour.^[46] Though Kershaw does not deny the radical anti-Semitism of the Nazis, he favors Mommsen’s view of the Holocaust being caused by the “culminative radicalization” of the Third Reich caused by the endless bureaucratic power struggles and a turn towards increasingly radical anti-Semitism within the Nazi elite. Despite his background in the functionalist historiography, Kershaw admits that his account of Hitler in World War II owes much to intentionalist historians like Gerhard Weinberg, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lucy Dawidowicz and Eberhard Jäckel.^[13] Kershaw accepts the picture of Hitler drawn by intentionalist historians as a fanatical ideologue who was obsessed with Social Darwinism, völkisch anti-Semitism (in which the Jewish people were viewed as a "race" biologically different from the rest of humanity rather than a religion), militarism and the perceived need for Lebensraum.^[13] However, in a 1992 essay, "'Improvised genocide?'", in which Kershaw traces how the ethnic cleansing campaign of Gauleiter Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau^[47] region annexed to Germany from Poland in 1939 led to a campaign of genocide by 1941, Kershaw argued that the process was indeed "improvised genocide" rather the fulfilment of a masterplan.^[48] Kershaw's views the Holocaust not as a plan as argued by the intentionists, but rather a process caused by the “culminative radicalization” of the Nazi state as articulated by the functionalists. Citing the work of the American historian Christopher Browning in his biography of Hitler, Kershaw argues that in the period 1939–41 the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was a "territorial solution", that such plans as the Nisko Plan and Madagascar Plan were serious and only in the latter half of 1941 did the phrase "Final Solution" come to refer to genocide.^[49] This view of the Holocaust as a process rather than a plan is the antithesis of the extreme intentionist approach as advocated by Lucy Dawidowicz, who argue that Hitler had decided upon genocide as early as November 1918, and that everything he did from that time onwards was directed towards that goal.^[50]

In recent years Kershaw has come to form a thesis based on the ideas of both traditions of Nazi theory.

The "Working Towards the Führer" concept[link]

Kershaw disagrees with Mommsen's "Weak Dictator" thesis: the idea that Hitler was a relatively unimportant player in the Third Reich. However, he has agreed with his idea that Hitler did not play much of a role in the day-to-day administration of Nazi Germany. Kershaw's way of explaining this paradox is his theory of "Working Towards the Führer", the phrase being taken from a 1934 speech by the Prussian civil servant Werner Willikens.^[51] Kershaw has argued that in Nazi Germany, officials of both the German state and Party bureaucracy usually took the initiative in beginning policy to meet Hitler's perceived wishes, or alternatively attempted to turn into policy Hitler’s often loosely and indistinctly phrased wishes.^[51] Though Kershaw does agree that Hitler possessed the powers that the "Master of the Third Reich" thesis championed by Norman Rich and Karl Dietrich Bracher would suggest, Kershaw has argued that Hitler was a "Lazy Dictator"; an indifferent dictator who really did not have the interest to involve himself much in the daily running of Nazi Germany.^[52] The only exceptions were the areas of foreign policy and military decisions, both areas that Hitler increasingly involved himself in from the late 1930s.^[52]

In a 1993 essay entitled "'Working Towards the Führer'", Kershaw argued that the German and Soviet dictatorships had more differences than similarities.^[18] Kershaw argued that Hitler was a very unbureaucratic leader who was highly averse to paper work in marked contrast to Stalin.^[18] Likewise, Kershaw argued that Stalin was highly involved in the running of the Soviet Union in contrast to Hitler whose involvement in the day to day decision making was limited, infrequent and capricious.^[53] Kershaw argued that the Soviet regime, despite all of its extreme brutality and utter ruthlessness was basically rational in its goal of seeking to modernize a backward country and had no equivalent of the "cumulative radicalization" towards increasingly irrational goals that Kershaw sees as marking Nazi Germany.^[54] In Kershaw's opinion, Stalin's power corresponded to Weber's category of bureaucratic authority whereas Hitler's power corresponded to Weber's category of charismatic authority.^[55] In Kershaw's view, what happened in Germany after 1933 was the imposition of Hitler's charismatic authority on top of the "legal-rational" authority system that had existed prior to 1933, leading to a gradual breakdown of any system of ordered authority in Germany.^[56] Kershaw argues that by 1938, the German state had been reduced to a hopeless, polycratic shambles of rival agencies all competing with each other to win Hitler's favor, which by that time had become the only source of political legitimacy.^[57] Kershaw sees this rivalry as causing the "cumulative radicalization" of Germany, and argues that though Hitler always favored the most radical solution to any problem, it was German officials themselves in attempting to win the Führer's approval who for the most part carried out on their own initiative increasingly "radical" solutions to perceived problems like the "Jewish Question" as opposed to being ordered to do so by Hitler.^[58] In this, Kershaw largely agrees with Mommsen's portrait of Hitler as a distant and remote leader standing in many ways above his own system, whose charisma and ideas served to set the general tone of politics.^[58] As an example of how Hitler's power functioned in practice, Kershaw used Hitler's directive to the Gauleiters Albert Forster and Arthur Greiser to "Germanize" the part of north-western Poland annexed to Germany in 1939 within the next 10 years with his promise that "no questions would be asked" about how this would be done.^[59][60] As Kershaw notes, the completely different ways Forster and Greiser sought to "Germanize" their Gaue with Forster simply having the local Polish population in his Gau signing forms saying they had "German blood" and Greiser carrying out a program of brutal ethnic cleansing of Poles in his Gau showed both how Hitler set events in motion, and how his Gauleiters could carry out totally different policies in pursuit of what they believed to be Hitler's wishes.^[59][60] In Kershaw's opinion, Hitler's vision of a racially cleansed Volksgemeinschaft provided the impetus for German officials to carry out increasing extreme measures to win his approval, and which ended with the Shoah.^[61]

The Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka has praised the concept of “working towards the Führer” as the best way of understanding how the Holocaust occurred, combining the best features, and avoiding the weaknesses of both the “functionalist” and “intentionalist” methods.^[62] Kulka argued that Kershaw demonstrated both Hitler’s central role in the “Final Solution” and why there was no need for any order from Hitler for the Holocaust, as the progress that led to the Shoah were “worked out” toward the Führer by almost everyone in Germany.^[62]

Thus, for Kershaw Nazi Germany was both a monocracy (rule of one) and polycracy (rule of many). Hitler held absolute power but did not choose to exercise it very much; the rival fiefdoms of the Nazi state fought each other and attempted to carry out Hitler's vaguely worded wishes and dimly defined orders by "Working Towards the Führer".

Honours and memberships[link]

• Fellow of the British Academy
• Co-Winner of the British Academy Book Prize, 2001 ^[63]
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Member of the Historical Association
• Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin^[64]
• 2002, Knighthood for Services to History^[65]
• 2004, A collection of scholarly essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw was published.^[66]
• 2005, Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography for Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis, and the Road to War

Published work[link]

• Bolton Priory Rentals and Ministers; Accounts, 1473–1539, (ed.) (Leeds, 1969)
• Bolton Priory. The Economy of a Northern Monastery, (Oxford, 1973).
• "The Persecution of the Jews and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich" pages 261–289 from Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, Volume 26, 1981.
• Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich. Bavaria, 1933–45, (Oxford, 1983, rev. 2002), ISBN 0-19-821922-9
• The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, (London, 1985, 4th ed., 2000) ISBN 0-340-76028-1
• The 'Hitler Myth'. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987, rev. 2001). ISBN 0-19-280206-2
• Weimar. Why did German Democracy Fail?, (ed.) (London, 1990) ISBN 0-312-04470-4
• Hitler: A Profile in Power, (London, 1991, rev. 2001)
• "'Improvised genocide?' The Emergence of the 'Final Solution' in the 'Wargenthau" pages 51–78 from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Volume 2, December 1992.
• "Working Towards the Führer: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship" pages 103–118 from Contemporary European History, Volume 2, Issue #2, 1993; reprinted on pages 231–252 from The Third Reich edited by Christian Leitz, London: Blackwill, 1999, ISBN 0-631-20700-7.
• Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, (ed. with Moshe Lewin) (Cambridge, 1997) ISBN 0-521-56521-9
• Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris, (London, 1998) ISBN 0-393-32035-9
• Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis, (London, 2000) ISBN 0-393-32252-1
• The Bolton Priory Compotus 1286–1325 (ed. with David Smith) (London, 2001)
• Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and the British Road to War, (London, 2004) ISBN 0-7139-9717-6
• “Europe's Second Thirty Years War” pages 10–17 from History Today, Volume 55, Issue # 9, September 2005
• Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940–1941 (London, 2007) ISBN 1-59420-123-4
• Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution (Yale, 2008) ISBN 0-300-12427-9
• Hitler (one-volume abridgment of Hitler 1889–1936 and Hitler 1936–1945; London, 2008) ISBN 1-84614-069-2
• Luck of the Devil The Story of Operation Valkyrie, (London: Penguin Books, 2009), ISBN 0-14-104006-8
• The End: Hitler's Germany 1944-45, (Allen Lane, 2011), ISBN 0-7139-9716-8

See also[link]

• List of Adolf Hitler books
• Saul Friedländer
• Daniel Goldhagen
• Michael H. Kater

Endnotes[link]

References[link]

• Working Towards the Führer: Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw, edited by Anthony McElligott and Tim Kirk, Manchester University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-7190-6732-4.
• Lukacs, John The Hitler of History, New York : Vintage Books, 1998, 1997, ISBN 0-375-70113-3.
• Marrus, Michael The Holocaust in History, Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987, ISBN 0-88619-155-6.
• Snowman, Daniel "Ian Kershaw" pages 18–20 from History Today Volume 51, Issue 7, July 2001.
• Kershaw, Ian (2008-10-19). "The writing life: sometimes history just depends on that next cup of coffee". Washington Post Book World: p. 11. 
• Pozzi, Enrico "Può suicidarsi una nazione? Ian Kershaw sugli ultimi 10 mesi della Germania nazista" (extended review of The End), Il Corpo, January 2012, [1]

External links[link]

On Kershaw

• Ian Kershaw's website at the University of Sheffield^{[dead link]}
• The Road to Destruction, Richard Gott on Hitler: Nemesis
• Sir Ian Kershaw: Dissecting Hitler
• Review of Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris
• Review of Making Friends With Hitler Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War
• The Germans Are Coming, Haaretz
• Review of Fateful Choices by Gerhard Weinberg.

Kershaw Interviewed

• Interview with Ian Kershaw on the Penguin website
• Interview with Ian Kershaw
• Interview with Kershaw
• Interview with Ian Kershaw

By Kershaw

• Beware the Moral High Ground
• Review of Hitler's Library

Kenan Malik, 2010.

Kenan Malik (born 1960) is an Indian-born English writer, lecturer and broadcaster, trained in neurobiology and the history of science. As a scientific author, his focus is on the philosophy of biology, and contemporary theories of multiculturalism, pluralism and race. These topics are core concerns in The Meaning of Race (1996), Man, Beast and Zombie (2000) and Strange Fruit: Why both sides are wrong in the race debate (2008).

His work contains a forthright defence of the values of the 18th-century Enlightenment, which he sees as having been distorted and misunderstood in more recent political and scientific thought.

Career[link]

Malik was born in India and brought up in Manchester, England. He studied neurobiology at the University of Sussex and History of Science at Imperial College, London. In between, he was a research psychologist at the Centre for Research into Perception and Cognition (CRPC) at the University of Sussex.

He has given lectures or seminars at a number of universities, including University of Cambridge (Department of Biological Anthropology); University of Oxford (St. Anthony's College and the Department for Continuing Education); the Institute of Historical Research, London; Goldsmiths College, University of London (Department of Social Anthropology); University of Liverpool (Department of Politics); Nottingham Trent University; University of Newcastle (Department of Social Policy and Sociology); University of Oslo; and the European University, Florence. In 2003, he was a visiting fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is currently Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Surrey.

As well as being a presenter of Analysis on BBC Radio 4, he has also presented Night Waves, Radio 3’s Arts and Ideas magazine. Malik has written and presented a number of TV documentaries, including Disunited Kingdom (2003), Are Muslims Hated (which was shortlisted for the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression award, in 2005), Let 'Em All In (2005) and Britain's Tribal Tensions (2006).

He has written for many newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, New Statesman, Prospect, TLS, The Times Higher Education Supplement, Nature, Rising East, and Göteborgs-Posten. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Politics[link]

Malik has long campaigned for equal rights, freedom of expression, and a secular society, and in defence of rationalism and humanism in the face of what he has called "a growing culture of irrationalism, mysticism and misanthropy".

In the 1980s, he was associated with a number of Marxist organisations, including the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), and Big Flame. He was also involved with anti-racist campaigns including the Anti-Nazi League and East London Workers Against Racism. He helped organise street patrols in East London to protect Asian families against racist attacks and was a leading member of a number of campaigns against deportations and police brutality including the Newham 7 campaign, the Afia Begum Campaign Against Deportations, and the Colin Roach Campaign.

Malik has written that the turning point in his relationship with the left came with the Salman Rushdie affair.^[1] Much of his political campaigning over the past decade has been in defence of free speech, secularism and scientific rationalism. Malik was one of the first left-wing critics of multiculturalism, has controversially opposed restrictions on hate speech, supported open door policies on immigration, opposed the notion of animal rights in a series of debates with Peter Singer and Richard Ryder, and spoken out in defence of animal experimentation.

Malik wrote for the RCP's magazine Living Marxism, later LM. Although the RCP has since disbanded, Malik has written for later incarnations of LM, and for its on-line successor, the British web magazine Spiked.

Areas of academic interest[link]

Malik's main areas of academic interest are philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind, scientific method and epistemology, theories of human nature, science policy, bioethics, political philosophy, the history, philosophy and sociology of race, and the history of ideas.

To date, he has published four books, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society and Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature, Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate and From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy.

Books[link]

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[edit] The Meaning of Race

The Meaning of Race examines the historical development, and philosophical and political roots, of the idea of race. It also explores the relationship between the idea of race and contemporary theories of multiculturalism and pluralism.

Malik argues that racial discourse and theories of racial difference arose in opposition to the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment, and gained their plausibility from "the persistence of differences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had accepted the concept of equality." (page 70) As the nineteenth century unfolded, the politically dominant classes appropriated science (particularly evolutionary theory) to support the idea of a natural order underlying social and economic inequalities, though nothing about the dynamic of science itself necessitated racial conclusions. Thus, "the discourse of race did not arise out of the categories of Enlightenment discourse but out of the relationship between Enlightenment thought and the social organisation of capitalism." (page 225)

The idea of race applied initially to class differences within European society, but was later applied to differences between Europeans and others, "and hence became marked by colour differences." (p. 8) In the twentieth century, racial theory was largely discredited by its association with Nazism, and the word "racism" entered the political vocabulary as a term of criticism, but the defeat of the Nazis led only to a recasting, not the destruction, of a belief in immutable differences among groups of human beings. This belief has been transferred to contemporary notions of culture.

As depicted by Malik, twentieth-century anthropological thought mistakenly divided humanity into integrated, holistic cultures that must be understood as static; such cultures must not be tampered with, since the nature of their harmonious functioning requires that they must "survive intact." (page 156). Malik sees this tendency in anthropology as another expression, along with the idea of race, of "a particularist, relativist, and anti-humanist philosophy" that has rejected Enlightenment universalism. (page 7) He opposes the "politics of difference" — the identification of competing social groups based on shared history and a sense of identity — believing it sets back the struggle for political and economic equality. The final chapters of The Meaning of Race contain a critique of postmodernist and poststructuralist theories, including the views of Edward Said. Here, Malik argues that such theories misinterpret the relationship between the West and other cultures, and are detrimental to the possibility of social equality. In its essence, Malik argues, postmodernism is defeatist — it is prepared to accept a place for marginalised groups within society without demanding true equality.

[edit] Man, Beast and Zombie

Man, Beast and Zombie investigates the historical roots, philosophical assumptions and alleged methodological problems of contemporary theories of human nature, in particular evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. He argues that, "The triumph of mechanistic explanations of human nature is as much the consequence of our culture's loss of nerve as it is of scientific advance." (pages 13–14) While rejecting epistemic relativism, with its denial of an objective truth about the world, Malik insists that scientific theories of human nature are, in practice, shaped by cultural influences, as well as being responsive to data. He argues that the scientific study of human nature has been distorted by post-war cultural pessimism. In examining evolutionary psychology and related theories, Malik distinguishes between these theories, which he sees as a form of universal Darwinism (attributing explanatory power to Darwinian theory in a wide range of domains), and the work of "circumspect Darwinists" (who are cautious about its explanatory power) (197).

Though Malik sees human beings as a product of evolution, and that universal Darwinist theories have merit when applied to non-human animals — and perhaps some merit when applied to human behaviour — he is sceptical about how far they can be applied to human beings. In particular, theories of a biologically-evolved human nature cannot, alone, account for the transformations of behaviour that arose from our immersion in a symbolic world built up out of language and culturally-meaningful relationships. Thus, "the scientific tools with which we investigate animal behaviour are inadequate for understanding human behaviour" (p. 231).

In discussing cognitive science and philosophy of mind, Malik concludes that each human being possesses "an extended mind"; a brain becomes a human mind only by its immersion in social relationships together with "other brains linked by language and culture." (p. 331) Human meaning derives not from nature but from the language-linked social network of which we are part." (p. 334) If we did succeed in creating a machine capable of participating in a human society like a human being, it would be human (334-35).

In the final chapter of Man, Beast and Zombie, Malik laments what he sees as an increasing reluctance to view individual people as autonomous, rational, and competent agents, and a tendency to view them as damaged, weak, incapable, and possessing limited control over their fates. All this has both encouraged and been reinforced by what Malik sees as mechanistic accounts of human nature. It has been accompanied by a shift of emphasis from negative liberty to positive liberties and paternalistic protections, and by an acceptance of limits to human possibilities and a deference to "nature" — all in marked contrast to the spirit of Enlightenment humanism.

[edit] Strange Fruit

Strange Fruit: Why both sides are wrong in the race debate (Oneworld, 2008) is a book focusing on the anti-enlightenment dichotomy of racial science and anti-racism and critiques both. Malik argues that racial scientists should be allowed to express their views publicly and be critiqued in the public domain, while also criticizing censorship from traditional anti-racist organisations. Most of the book focuses on science and race and whether race can tell us anything about humans, he argues for a third way. He argues that 'race' may be a poor man's clue to many things like genetic disease in populations, but this does not have anything to do with 'race' by itself, he argues 'race' may be an obvious indicator of populations of genetics within multi-ethnic countries, but it is not exclusive to 'races' as a whole. The book also critiques multicultural paradigms about identity and cultural inheritance. Malik concludes that 'race' is not a biological concept and is useless as a way to separate people and he says that it is not just ignorant racial scientists that perpetuate this myth, it is anti-racists too.

[edit] From Fatwa To Jihad: The Rushdie Affair And Its Legacy

From Fatwa To Jihad is his latest book, released to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Fatwa placed on Rushdie. In his analysis Malik documents the events surrounding the Bradford protests, the Fatwa, the riots in India and the government and media response. Malik also explores the life of immigration from the Indian subcontinent to Britain and how that has shaped modern British-Asian identity. He also documents and critiques the rise of state multiculturalism and the long term effects on cities like Birmingham. Coupled with an analysis of the culture of self-censorship and fear of today's media, the book neatly ties up a wide range of subjects into an account of how and why the shadow of the Fatwa still hangs over us.

Current affiliations[link]

Dr. Malik is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association and a trustee of the free-speech magazine Index on Censorship.

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society, Palgrave / New York University Press, 1996
• Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2000 / Rutgers University Press, 2002
• Strange Fruit: Why both sides are wrong in the race debate, Oneworld, 2008.
• From Fatwa To Jihad: The Rushdie Affair And Its Legacy, Atlantic Books, 2009.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Kenan Malik

• Personal website
• "Bad bargain made in the mosque" by Kenan Malik, The Times, July 6, 2006
• "The Colour-Coded Prescription", transcript, presenter Kenan Malik, Analysis, BBC, November 17, 2005
• Globe of the World, transcript, presenter Kenan Malik, Analysis, BBC, March 16, 2006
• "What hate?, Muslims believe they are under attack from all sides. But racial abuse is being exaggerated to stifle critics of Islam" by Kenan Malik, The Guardian, January 7, 2005
• "Multiculturalism and the road to terror", essay by Kenan Malik, Handelsblatt, January 3, 2006, published at kenanmalik.com
• Islamophobia myth, essay by Kenan Malik, Prospect Magazine, February 2005, published at communautarisme.net
• "Too much respect: Liberals argue that a more diverse society requires less diverse opinion. Nonsense", essay by Kenan Malik, Prospect Magazine, March 23, 2006, published at freethinktank.com
• "What is it to be human?", Talk given as part of a debate with Susan Blackmore entitled 'Flesh not Meat: Are we more than matter?' at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 5 December 2000
• Video (and audio) of interview/discussion with Kenan Malik by Kerry Howley on Bloggingheads.tv

Charlie Rose
Rose in May 2010
Born	Charles Peete Rose, Jr. (1942-01-05) January 5, 1942 (age 70) Henderson, North Carolina, U.S.
Education	Duke University B.A. (1964) Duke University J.D. (1968)
Occupation	Talk show host Journalist
Years active	1972–present
Notable credit(s)	Charlie Rose, 60 Minutes II, 60 Minutes, CBS News Nightwatch, CBS This Morning
Website
http://www.charlierose.com/

Charles Peete "Charlie" Rose, Jr. (born January 5, 1942)^[1] is an American television talk show host and journalist. Since 1991 he has hosted Charlie Rose, an interview show distributed nationally by PBS since 1993. He has also co-anchored CBS This Morning since January 2012. Rose, along with Lara Logan, has hosted the revived CBS classic Person to Person, a news program during which celebrities are interviewed in their homes, originally hosted from 1953 to 1961 by Edward R. Murrow.^[2]

Early life[link]

Rose was born in Henderson, North Carolina, the only child^[3] of Margaret Frazier and Charles Peete Rose, Sr., tobacco farmers who owned a country store.^[4][5] As a child, Rose lived above his parents' store in Henderson and helped out with the family business from age seven.^[6] Rose admitted in a Fresh Dialogues interview that as a child his insatiable curiosity was constantly getting him in trouble.^[7] A high school basketball star, Rose entered Duke University intending to pursue a degree with a pre-med track, but an internship in the office of Democratic North Carolina Senator B. Everett Jordan got him interested in politics.^[8] Rose graduated in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in history. At Duke, he was a member of the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity. He earned a Juris Doctor from the Duke University School of Law in 1968.^[6] He met his wife, Mary (née King), while attending Duke.^[3][4]

Career[link]

After his wife was hired by the BBC (in New York), Rose handled some assignments for the BBC on a freelance basis. In 1972, while continuing to work at Bankers Trust, he landed a job as a weekend reporter for WPIX-TV. His break came in 1974, after Bill Moyers hired Rose as managing editor for the PBS series Bill Moyers' International Report. In 1975, Moyers named Rose executive producer of Bill Moyers Journal. Rose soon began appearing on camera. "A Conversation with Jimmy Carter," one installment of Moyers's series U.S.A.: People and Politics, won a 1976 Peabody Award. Rose worked at several networks honing his interview skills until KXAS-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth hired him as program manager and gave him the late-night time slot that would become the Charlie Rose show.

Rose worked for CBS News (1984–1990) as the anchor of CBS News Nightwatch, the network's first late-night news broadcast. The Nightwatch broadcast of Rose's interview with Charles Manson won an Emmy Award in 1987.^[4] In 1990, Rose left CBS to serve as anchor of Personalities, a syndicated program produced by Fox Broadcasting Company, but he got out of his contract after six weeks because of the tabloid-style content of the show. Charlie Rose premiered on PBS station Thirteen/WNET on September 30, 1991, and has been nationally syndicated since January 1993. In 1994, Rose moved the show to a studio owned by Bloomberg Television, which allowed for improved satellite interviewing.^[9]

Rose was a correspondent for 60 Minutes II^[10] from its inception in January 1999 until its cancellation in September 2005, and was later named a correspondent on 60 Minutes.^[11]

Rose was a member of the board of directors of Citadel Broadcasting Corporation from 2003 to 2009.^[3] In May 2010, Charlie Rose delivered the commencement address at North Carolina State University.

On November 15, 2011, it was announced that Rose would return to CBS to help anchor CBS This Morning, replacing The Early Show, commencing January 9, 2012, along with co-anchors Erica Hill and Gayle King.

Cameo appearances[link]

Rose has appeared as himself in the 1998 film Primary Colors,^[12] in a 2000 episode of The Simpsons^[13] and in the 2008 movie Elegy.^[14] He and his show were also used in the Wes Anderson film The Royal Tenenbaums. He also appears as himself in the 2011 George Clooney directed film, The Ides of March.

[edit] Accusations of conflict of interest

While hosting the 2002 Coca-Cola Company shareholders' meeting, Rose said "few companies are able to connect as completely with consumers in the way that Coca-Cola is. It is a privilege to be associated with [The Coca-Cola family] ... This is the business of Coca-Cola: being part of a family, being worldwide, doing well and doing good at the same time."^[15] Afterward, Coca-Cola agreed to become what Rose called "a leading underwriter" of The Charlie Rose Show, paying "six or possibly seven figures."^[16] Even the Charlie Rose mugs used on his PBS show feature a Coca-Cola logo on one side.^[17][18] Although CBS News policy bars correspondents from doing commercials and product endorsements, the Washington Post reported CBS was "comfortable" with Rose's actions. Rose insists he "would never do a story on 60 Minutes II about anybody who underwrites my PBS show."^[16]

[edit] Quiet influence

The New York Times reported that Rose encouraged a discussion between the leaders of NBC and Fox, that led eventually to a mutual reduction in ad hominem attacks between Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly on their respective news programs.^[19]

Rose has attended several Bilderberg Group conference meetings, including meetings held in the United States in 2008;^[20] Spain in 2010;^[21] and Switzerland in 2011.^[22] These unofficial conferences hold guests from North America and Western Europe, most of whom are political leaders and businessmen. Details of meetings are closed off to the public and strictly invitation-only, and critics^[who?] speculate the controversial nature of these meetings of highly influential people. Accusations from conspiracy theorists against The Charlie Rose show claim that it has become the US media outlet for Bilderberg.^{[23][unreliable source?]}

Personal life[link]

Rose's twelve-year marriage to Mary Rose (née King) ended in divorce in 1980. Mary is the sister-in-law of Morgan Stanley Chairman John J. Mack. Since 1993, his companion has been socialite and chairman of the New York City Planning Commission and director of the city department of planning Amanda Burden, a stepdaughter of CBS founder William S. Paley.^[24]

On March 29, 2006, after experiencing shortness of breath in Syria, Rose was flown to Paris and underwent surgery for mitral valve repair in the Georges-Pompidou European Hospital. His surgery was performed under the supervision of Alain F. Carpentier, a pioneer of the procedure.^[25] Rose returned to the air on June 12, 2006, with Bill Moyers and Yvette Vega (the show's executive producer), to discuss his surgery and recuperation.

In a 2009 Fresh Dialogues interview, Rose described his life as "great and glorious."^[7] He added, '"I get up every morning with a new adventure. The adventure is fueled by interesting people. I get a chance to control my own destiny. I do something that is immediately either appreciated or not. I get feedback."

Rose owns a 575-acre (2.33 km²) farm in Oxford, North Carolina, an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York City, a beach house in Bellport, New York, an apartment in Washington D.C.^[3] and an apartment in Paris, France.

References[link]

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (March 2012)

• Charlie Rose Official website of his eponymous show
• Charlie Rose official channel on YouTube
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Charlie Rose at the Internet Movie Database
• Charlie Rose collected news and commentary at the Los Angeles Times
• Charlie Rose collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Charlie Rose at the Notable Names Database
• Charlie Rose shows on Hulu
• celebritynetworth.com, Celebrity Net Worth, Charlie Rose
• Why Business Loves Charlie Rose David A. Kaplan, Fortune, September 28, 2009

Simon Rimmer
Born	Simon Rimmer (1963-05-05) May 5, 1963 (age 49) Wallasey, Merseyside
Occupation	Celebrity Chef
Years active	1990–present

Simon Rimmer (born 5 May 1963) is the resident chef on Channel 4's Sunday Brunch which started on Sunday 25 March 2012. Sunday Brunch replaced Simon's previous show BBC2's Something for the Weekend, which first aired on Sunday 8 October 2006. He is also the face of cooking video website, Eat The Chef. He is married with two children.

Despite not being a vegetarian himself, Rimmer founded Greens, a vegetarian restaurant in West Didsbury, Manchester in 1990.^[1] Two years later, The Guardian described Greens as one of the most exciting new restaurants in UK, and it has gone on to win several awards, including The Big Issue's Restaurant of the Year, and most recently North-west Restaurant of the Year.

His television career began with Granada Breeze, hosting shows such as Livetime and Battle of the Chefs. However, he has also appeared regularly on programmes including This Morning, Granada Tonight, A Taste for Travel, Lunchtime Live and The Afternoon Show, Gloria’s Open House – Channel 5, Xchange for CBBC and a spot of co-presenting on UKTV's Great Food Live and BBC1's To Buy or Not to Buy. Simon presented This Little Farmer for BBC One and Making a Meal of It, also for BBC Two.

He was the mentor on the Channel 5 programme Breaking Into Tesco, a show where people competed to get their food products sold by Tesco.

His first book, The Accidental Vegetarian", was published in October 2004. His second book, The Rebel Cook, was published in October 2006. His third book came out in spring 2008, it was co-written with Tim Lovejoy entitled Lazy Brunch, which is based on the feature in Something from the Weekend. In spring 2009, Mitchell Beazley published his fourth book, 'The Seasoned Vegetarian'.

Simon opened his second restaurant Earle in Hale in October 2006, this time for meat-eaters. It has been named top celebrity restaurant to eat at in the Observer Food Monthly.

Simon supports Liverpool Football Club, but also has an in depth knowledge of the history of Tranmere Rovers, which he chose as his specialist subject on the BBC quiz Mastermind.^{[citation needed]}

References[link]

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2010)

External links[link]

• Greens Restaurant
• Earle Restaurant
• Eat The Chef - Video Recipes by Simon and others
• Simon Rimmer recipes
• - His leg condition
• The Cheshire Cookery School