BOOK REVIEW / Bookshop Window: Ribbentrop - Michael Bloch: Bantam, pounds 9.99

This might be the definitive biography of that great opportunist of Nazism, Joachim von Ribbentrop, a businessman who joined the Nazis as they seized power, and served first as Hitler's ambassador to the United Kingdom until 1938, and then as Foreign Minister. Lacking a vision or a constituency of his own, Ribbentrop played to Hitler's own crazy views, thus winning a reputation as an intellectual giant. Among his ideas: that England and France would never fight, that the United States was not a serious enemy, and that the Soviet Union constituted a reliable, long-term ally. A cowardly minor aristocrat on the make, von Ribbentrop went to the gallows in Nuremberg 'perfectly composed' because of his faith in eternal life.