A01=Alan Allport
Anthony Beevor
appeasement
Author_Alan Allport
battle of the atlantic
blitz
brexit
british social history
Category=NHWR7
Daniel Todman Britain's War
Dominic Sandbrook Who Dares Wins
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
history of the blitz
Ian Kershaw
Max Hastings
modern british history
neville chamberlain
Product details
- ISBN 9781781257814
- Weight: 964g
- Dimensions: 162 x 240mm
- Publication Date: 03 Sep 2020
- Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Shortlisted for The Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History 2021
A Times History Book of the Year
'Britain's wartime story has been told many times, but never as cleverly as this' Dominic Sandbrook
'Will make you think anew not just about the war, but about the Britain and Britons that fought it' Daniel Todman
'A bracing reminder of the power of brilliant history to make us reconsider what we think we know' David Egerton
In the bleak first half of the Second World War, Britain stood alone against the Axis forces. Isolated and outmanoeuvred, it seemed as though she might fall at any moment. Only an extraordinary effort of courage - by ordinary men and women - held the line.
The Second World War is the defining experience of modern British history, a new Iliad for our own times. But, as Alan Allport reveals in this, the first part of a major new two-volume history, the real story was often very different from the myth that followed it. From the subtle moral calculus of appeasement to the febrile dusts of the Western Desert, Allport interrogates every aspect of the conflict - and exposes its echoes in our own age.
Challenging orthodoxy and casting fresh light on famous events from Dunkirk to the Blitz, this is the real story of a clash between civilisations that remade the world in its image.
Alan Allport is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Syracuse University. Born in Liverpool, he grew up listening to family stories of the Merseyside Blitz and the Battle of the Atlantic while building Airfix kits and reading comics. He attended Liverpool Polytechnic where he received an undergraduate degree in physics; afterwards he emigrated to the United States, where he began a second life as a historian. He is the author of two previous volumes of history, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War 1939-1945, described by the historian Andrew Roberts as 'Second World War history at its best', and Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War, which won the 2010 Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
