The clash of nations and their alliances, the strivings of Empires and their collapse, and the struggles of nationalities and national groups were central to the century.
“It is called the century of the common man,” wrote Winston Churchill, “because in it the common man has suffered the most.”
There are also golden threads … the courage and perseverance of innumerable individuals, and the assertion of the equal rights of all nations, and of the rights of the individuals, against the frequently crushing burdens of State oppression and military tyranny.
“On 8 March 1983 President Reagan described the Soviet Union as ‘the focus of evil in the modern world’.”
The History of the Twentieth Century, A Concise Edition
After graduating in 1960 with a BA in modern history, I went as a Research Scholar to St Antony’s College, Oxford, where I studied British imperial history. As a culmination of forty years as a historian, I published a three-volume history of the Twentieth Century. I had begun work on it a decade before the century came to an end. Two years later I worked to reduce the three volumes to a single volume, History of The Twentieth Century.
Some of humanity’s greatest achievements took place in the Twentieth Century, and some of its worst excesses. It was a century of improvement in quality of life for millions of people, yet also a century of decline in many parts of the world. The clash of nations and their alliances,…
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A comprehensive history of the first thirty-three years of the Twentieth Century, starting with the intervention of the Great Powers (including Britain, Germany and the United States) in China, and closing with Roosevelt as the newly-elected President of the United States and the inauguration of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of…
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The story of the middle years of the Twentieth Century, starting with the rise of dictatorial and military regimes in Europe and Asia, spanning the Second World War, and culminating in the establishment of the Iron Curtain and the East-West divide. It examines, among other conflicts, the Japanese invasion of…
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In 1952, the year this volume opens, the population of the world was approaching 3,000 million (three billion). In the second half of the century it had more than doubled, to six billion, of whom 1,000 million live in China and at least 950 million in India. Merely to maintain…
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This volume gives a glimpse of the enormity of the horrors which Europe witnessed, and of the strange and often muddled men who created those horror, or failed to stop them until, for many millions, it was too late.
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This book traces the origins of “appeasement” in British foreign policy, and follows its troubled and at times turbulent course from the First World War to 1939. It emphasizes that appeasement was not a coward’s creed, but a constructive, realistic policy based upon British interests, and a search for European peace and…
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How did British Politicians react to Nazi Germany? Did their diplomats and advisors support them? What was the real policy of Chamberlain’s Government? In this book Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott reveal to what extent the British Government were willing to come to terms with Hitler, regardless of the fate…
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Published in the “Problems and Perspectives in History” series, this slim volume covers aspects of Anglo-German relations from 1914 to 1939, from the ending of the Great War, to the Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations and their articles, to Rearmament and the views of Ambassadors and Ministers of Government. Chapters focus…
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The story, told through Clifford Allen’s own letters, notes and other documents, of a Cambridge – educated Socialist who was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the First World War, and was later active in international affairs, first as a strong supporter of appeasement, and then as a staunch opponent of Nazi persecution.…
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Horace Rumbold entered the diplomatic service in 1891 and remained in it for more than forty years, until 1933. He served his apprenticeship during the last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign, in Egypt, Spain and Austria-Hungary. On the eve of the First World War, in the absence of the British…
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A study of British Imperial rule in India from 1905 to 1910, based on the correspondence and diaries of Sir James Dunlop Smith, at that time Private Secretary to the Viceroy Lord Minto and a man unrivalled in his knowledge of Indian affairs. The book deals with a time of…
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Part of the Prentice-Hall “Great Lives Observed” series which combines the intimacy of autobiography, through Lloyd George’s own words, the immediacy of eye-witness observation, through the words of his contemporaries, and the objectivity of modern scholarship of analyses in retrospect, by leading historians, political scientists, and politicians to create a…
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