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Author: Max Hastings
'The best single-volume history of the war ever written' DOMINIC SANDBOOK, SUNDAY TIMES
‘A masterly account of that epic conflict’ ROBERT HARRIS
The anniversary edition of multi-million copy bestselling author Max Hastings’s seminal one-volume history of World War Two, published for the 80th anniversary of the end of the war.
This is a study of the greatest and most terrible event in history, which shows its impact upon hundreds of millions of people around the world – soldiers, sailors and airmen; British housewives and Indian peasants; SS killers and the citizens of Leningrad; Japanese suicide pilots and American carrier crews. This is the ‘everyman’s story'. It is an attempt to answer the question: ‘What was the Second World War like?'
'This global history of the Second World War is the best there is' NIGEL JONES, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
‘No other general history of the war amalgamates so successfully the gut-wrenching personal details and the essential strategic arguments. Hastings has triumphed’ HEW STRACHAN, THE TIMES
‘No one could be better qualified than Max Hastings to write a single-volume history that covers every aspect of the Second World War… You will love this splendid book’ ANDREW ROBERTS, FINANCIAL TIMES
About the author
Max Hastings is the author of twenty-seven books, most of them about war. Born in London in 1945, he attended University College, Oxford before becoming a journalist. In 1967 he was a World Press Institute Fellow in the United States, then stayed to report the 1968 US election. Thereafter he worked as a reporter for BBC TV and British newspapers, covering eleven conflicts including Vietnam, the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the 1982 South Atlantic war. His first major book was BOMBER COMMAND, published in Britain and the US in 1979. He has since authored such works as VIETNAM, CATASTROPHE, ARMAGEDDON, RETRIBUTION, WINSTON'S WAR, THE KOREAN WAR AND INFERNO. Between 1986 and 2002 he served as editor-in-chief of the British Daily Telegraph, then editor of the London Evening Standard. He has won many awards both for his books and his journalism, including the 2012 $100,000 Pritzker Library prize for lifetime achievement, and the 2019 Bronze Arthur Ross medal of the US Council For Foreign Relations for VIETNAM. He lives in Berkshire, UK, with his wife Penny and has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry. Max says: 'I am lucky enough to have been able to earn my living doing the things I love most: travelling and hearing incredible stories from people all over the world, then writing about their experiences in war, when mankind is at both its best and worst'. Among the scariest moments of his career as a war correspondent, he cites following the embattled Israeli army on the Golan Heights in October 1973, and reporting the last weeks in Vietnam in 1975, before flying out of the US Embassy compound in its final evacuation.
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