REVIEW BY ANDREW MULHOLLAND History is usually about people, while military strategy tends not to be, and can sometimes seem rather dry. This book by Phillips O’Brien reminds us that it is leaders who actually determine strategy, with all of…
A besieged city, a hostile army enveloping on all sides, and a ruthless commander refusing to surrender – this was not 1942, but 1919, when the city in southern Russia then known as Tsaritsyn was on the verge of being…
This book convincingly argues that Stalin’s war began long before the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, and can really be said to have begun in the late 1920s. Initially, this was a war of suppression at home, combined…
‘I trust no one, not even myself.’ So the merciless dictator of the Soviet Union reportedly once said. In this new book, Sean McMeekin explores the Second World War from Joseph Stalin’s perspective. From his complex relations with both Winston…
From 1917 to the 1950s, Winston Churchill had a long and bumpy relationship with the Soviet Union, and it had a profound effect on his reputation in America. Taylor Downing charts the zigzags.