A CONFLICT LIKE NO OTHER, it has come to define the very idea of war itself. Great power rivalry prepared the ground, yet so did bitter ethnic disputes following the collapse of four empires, as did the ideological clash between Fascism and Communism. More than any other, the Second World War was dominated, in the age of totalitarianism, by leaders who determined the course of events in a way we have not seen since then - and thought we would never see again.
Using the most up-to-date scholarship and research, Antony 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. Despite the titanic scale of his canvas, he never loses sight of the fates of the ordinary men and women whose lives were scattered by inexorable forces.
Revised and with a new foreword to commemorate the 80th anniversary of VE Day, this is the unrivalled single-volume history of the greatest conflict the world has ever known, by our foremost historian of war.
[Antony Beevor] crams in so much and does it so well because he can. THE GOOD BOOK GUIDE
Author
About Antony Beevor
Antony 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.
