“Ms. Sereny’s books were as much psychological studies as historical ones. As her work made plain, she was interested less in plumbing the ‘what’ of history’s evil deeds than she was in the ‘why’ of their perpetrators. Few people if any, she often said, were born evil; instead, she argued, they were made that way by traumatic conditions that could generally be located in childhood. What interested her above all was conscience.”