“For too long, the archeology of knowledge about the swastika has been confined to books and part-works which belong roughly mid-way between Nazi nostolgia and the occult. Malcolm Quinn’s well-argued study helps to relocate the swastika within a variety of fresh contexts: the parallel histories of archeology, colonization and design; polemics about the ways in which symbols work; analysis of the rhetoric of the image. The point, as he says, is to break the chain of reference from image to image, the means by which the symbol is constructed.’ So this book is about symbolism, rather than Nazism, and it represents an important and even courageous contribution to the study of visual culture since the late nineteenth century.“ —Christopher Frayling, Professor of Cultural History, Royal College of Art