Books

To a remarkable degree, even in 2010 the period of Winston Churchill’s war leadership continues to define many British people’s view of our own country. We have been told more about him than any other human being. Thousands of people of many nations have recorded encounters. The most vivid wartime memory of a British Eighth Army veteran whom I once met derived from a day in August 1942 when he found the prime minister his neighbour in a North African desert latrine. Read More

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Forty-something years ago, when I was a teenager, even then avidly preoccupied with the Second World War, the study of its history was still dominated by fiercely nationalistic perceptions. Americans wildly overrated their battlefield contribution to victory, and perhaps underestimated their decisive industrial one. The British, astonishingly enough, still perceived themselves as the inhabitants of middle earth. The Russians barely acknowledged that the western allies had participated in the war at all. Read More

(Published as INFERNO in the US) From the New York Times: “Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945” sums up and surpasses all his previous publications: a new, original and necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life’s work Read More

Max's next book is to be a study of 1914- the approach to the First World War, its outbreak and early campaigns up to December, when the vast European battles of movement ended, and the trench stalemate became acknowledged on both the Eastern and Western fronts. 1914: Europe's Tragedy will feature Max's usual blend of top-down analysis and bottom-up human experience, mostly based on research in archives around Europe. Below is a snapshot, a random sample, of a few of the hundreds of pages of notes the author has already assembled, before starting to write the epic narrative that will be published for the centenary in 2014. Read More