Clash of the Titans

Many people have noticed the ironic -- or revelatory -- congruence of Freud and Hitler living at the same time in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Consider -- in their very different ways -- Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin's Wittgenstein's Vienna and A Nervous Splendor by Frederic Morton.

But in The Death of Sigmund Freud, Mark Edmundson has expanded his New York Times Magazine article to an entire book devoted to their crossed paths and the illlumination each casts on the other, in particular on the continuing appeal of "authoritarian" politics (the book will be published next month in the U.S.). Nicholas Shakespeare reviews it for the Telegraph.