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Find out moreAntony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst. A regular officer in the 11th Hussars, he served in Germany and England. He has published several novels, while his works of non-fiction include The Spanish Civil War, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, which won the 1993 Runciman Award, Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall, 1945. With his wife, Artemis Cooper, he wrote Paris After the Liberation: 1944-1949.
His book Stalingrad was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, the Wolfson History Prize and the Hawthornden Prize in 1999. It became a number-one bestseller both in hardback and paperback, the UK edition alone selling half a million copies, and has been published around the world in twenty-one translations. Berlin: The Downfall 1945 has dominated the bestseller lists even more than Stalingrad. Most of his titles are published by Penguin.
Antony Beevor is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.
The Second World War began in August 1939 on the edge of Manchuria and ended there exactly six years later with the Soviet invasion of northern China. The war in Europe appeared completely divorced from the war in the Pacific and China, and yet events on opposite sides of the world had profound effects. Using the most up-to-date scholarship and research, Beevor assembles the whole picture in a gripping narrative that extends from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and from the snowbound steppe to the North African Desert. Although filling the broadest canvas on a heroic scale, Beevor's THE SECOND WORLD WAR never loses sight of the fate of the ordinary soldiers and civilians whose lives were crushed by the titanic forces unleashed in this, the most terrible war in history.
The Second World War began in August 1939 on the edge of Manchuria and ended there exactly six years later with the Soviet invasion of northern China. The war in Europe appeared completely divorced from the war in the Pacific and China, and yet events on opposite sides of the world had profound effects. Using the most up-to-date scholarship and research, Beevor assembles the whole picture in a gripping narrative that extends from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, from the snowbound steppe to the North African Desert, to the Burmese jungle, Gulag prisoners drafted into punishment battalions and to the unspeakable cruelties of the Sino-Japanese War. Moral choice forms the basis of all human drama, and no other period in history has presented greater dilemmas both for leaders and ordinary people, nor offered such examples of tragedy, the corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, betrayal, perversity, self-sacrifice, unbelievable sadism and unpredictable kindness. Although filling the broadest canvas on a heroic scale, Beevor's THE SECOND WORLD WAR never loses sight of the fate of the ordinary soldiers and civilians whose lives were crushed by the titanic forces unleashed in this, the most terrible war in history.
Shortlisted for the Galaxy Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2010. As usual Antony Beevor’s style makes a history book read like an action, blockbuster novel. If your knowledge of the Normandy landings is limited then this is a great book to give you an accessible, overall understanding of events.
As usual Antony Beevor’s style makes a history book read like an action, blockbuster novel. If your knowledge of the Normandy landings is limited then this is a great book to give you an accessible, overall understanding of events.
Antony Beevor obviously has a great interest in the second world war from the volume of work he has dedicated to the subject. What is always amazing about his work is that while engrossing, educational and fascinating he also leaves you with a sense of the destructiveness and futility of war. Berlin is an absorbing account of the final downfall of Hitler’s Germany.
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 1999. This has really become the ‘go to’ book if you want to know the events that occurred in October 1942 for the battle of Stalingrad. Shocking, stunning and compelling this book shows the true horrors and costs of war as well as the bravery of soldiers. Their strength and courage should not be forgotten and this book is essential reading.
D-DAY: The Battle for Normandy is the first major account in more than twenty years to cover the invasion from June 6, 1944, up to the liberation of Paris on August 25. It is the first book to describe not only the experiences of the American, British, Canadian and German soldiers, but also the terrible suffering of the French caught up in the fighting. The Allied fleet was by far the largest amphibious assault ever attempted, and what followed was a battle as savage as anything seen on the Eastern Front. Even the joys of liberation had their darker side. The war in northern France marked not just a generation but the whole of the postwar world, profoundly influencing relations between America and Europe.Beevor draws upon his research in more than thirty archives in six countries, going back to original accounts, interviews conducted by combat historians just after the action and many diaries and letters donated to museums and archives in recent years. D-Day: The Battle for Normandy will surely be hailed as the consummate account of the Normandy invasion and the ferocious offensive that led to the liberation of Paris.From the Compact Disc edition.
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 1999. This has really become the ‘go to’ book if you want to know the events that occurred in October 1942 for the battle of Stalingrad. Shocking, stunning and compelling this book shows the true horrors and costs of war as well as the bravery of soldiers. Their strength and courage should not be forgotten and this book is essential reading.
Antony Beevor's Paris After Liberation: 1944-1949 is a remarkable historical account of the chaos and uncertainty that followed the liberation of Paris in August, 1944 'A beautifully written book about a vast tapestry of military, political and social upheaval. Remarkably well-researched, wise, balanced, very funny at times . . . I was a witness to events in Paris in the first desperate, glorious, mad weeks, and this is just how it was' Dirk Bogarde Post-liberation Paris: an epoch charged with political and conflicting emotions. Liberation was greeted with joy but marked by recriminations and the trauma of purges. The feverish intellectual arguments of the young took place amidst the mundane reality of hunger and fuel shortages. This is a thrilling, unsurpassed account of the drama and upheaval of one of history's most fascinating eras. 'A dashing, multi-dimensional story. This book covers all aspects of life - diplomacy, strategy, rationing, politics and politicking (from Churchill, Petain's and de Gaulle's point of view), the international theatricals and the tourist invasion, blitzkrieg and Ritzkrieg - to create a lovely tapestry, threaded with facts and figures' Olivier Todd, Sunday Times 'Absorbing . . . a rich, many-layered account, selecting from official documents, private archives, memoirs and histories with a wonderful lightness of touch, so that the most complex events become clear' Jenny Uglow, Independent on Sunday Antony Beevor is the renowned author of Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, and Berlin, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees' Award. His books have sold nearly four million copies.
Antony Beevor obviously has a great interest in the second world war from the volume of work he has dedicated to the subject. What is always amazing about his work is that while engrossing, educational and fascinating he also leaves you with a sense of the destructiveness and futility of war. Berlin is an absorbing account of the final downfall of Hitler’s Germany.
The bestselling author of STALINGRAD and BERLIN: THE DOWNFALL on the Spanish Civil War, drawing on masses of newly discovered material from the Spanish, Russian and German archives. The civil war that tore Spain apart between 1936 and 1939 and attracted liberals and socialists from across the world to support the cause against Franco was one of the most hard-fought and bitterest conflicts of the 20th century: a war of atrocities and political genocide and a military testing ground before WWII for the Russians, Italians and Germans, whose Condor Legion so notoriously destroyed Guernica. Antony Beevor's account narrates the origins of the Civil War and its violent and dramatic course from the coup d'etat in July 1936 through the savage fighting of the next three years which ended in catastrophic defeat for the Republicans in 1939. And he succeeds especially well in unravelling the complex political and regional forces that played such an important part in the origins and history of the war.
Acclaimed historian and best-selling author Antony Beevor vividly brings to life the epic struggles that took place in Second World War Crete - reissued with a new introduction. 'The best book we have got on Crete' Observer The Germans expected their airborne attack on Crete in 1941 - a unique event in the history of warfare - to be a textbook victory based on tactical surprise. They had no idea that the British, using Ultra intercepts, knew their plans and had laid a carefully-planned trap. It should have been the first German defeat of the war, but a fatal misunderstanding turned the battle round. Nor did the conflict end there. Ferocious Cretan freedom fighters mounted a heroic resistance, aided by a dramatic cast of British officers from Special Operations Executive.
Olga Chekhova was the niece of playwright Anton Chekhov and a stunning Russian beauty. She was also a famous Nazi-era film actress, closely associated with Adolf Hitler. After fleeing Bolshevik Moscow for Berlin in 1920, she was recruited by her composer brother Lev to work for Soviet intelligence. In return, her family were allowed to join her. Several of them were trapped in Berlin as the Red Army approached in 1945. As Olga had appeared in photographs with Hitler his entourage, the rest of her family in Moscow were waiting to be arrested by the NKVD secret police. Based largely on new material, Antony Beevor has pieced together a breathtaking story of a family surviving through the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, the rise of Hitler and Stalin, and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. It's an extraordinary story from extraordinary times.
