Pioneering the study of inhumanity

By Matthew Reisz. The story of a remarkable research centre devoted to understanding “the roots of extremism” has been reconstructed in a new radio documentary. The centre’s origins stem from a speech by the then Observer editor David Astor in April 1962, in which he argued that since most Nazi leaders and supporters were “not mad in a medical sense”, we had to confront something “deeply alarming and disturbing” about human nature - namely “the pathological possibilities of the normal mind”. More...