History of the 20th Century

Description

This single-volume history takes us up to the 21st century, weaving a rich historical narrative of the multifarious and contradictory events of the 20th, ranging across the bloody events of many wars (from Korea to Bosnia), the post-war resurrection of Europe and the United Nations, the Arms Race, the shooting of JFK, the advent of computerisation, Man's arrival on the moon, AIDS and heart transplants, Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is history that aims to make sense of the most destructive yet most creative century humanity has ever experienced.

Martin Gilbert was born in London in 1936 and educated at Highgate School and Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1962, he became research assistant to Randolph Churchill and, after Randolph's death, succeeded him as biographer of Sir Winston Churchill. He is the author of many works of history and lives in London and Jerusalem.

'In his great work, the writing is lucid, the pace perfectly judged, the evidence vividly conjured. The horrors are heightened by a style of almost Confucian reticence, which teaches without didacticism. In Gilbert's vision of history, the vast range never blurs the human scale. He is inspired by a victim of the Japanese brutalisation of Canton in 1937: "Historians may appropriate only a line or two to record this present catastrophe, but it is tremendous to those of us that are in it."' FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO, Sunday Times