THE PHONEY VICTORY

Author Peter Hitchens Price £17.99 Publisher IB Taurus

Peter Hitchens is no stranger to controversy, insisting that Hitler and the Nazi regime had to be crushed, but Britain should have followed the example of the US and waited to enter the war from a position of military and diplomatic strength. Yet a war, begun in uncertainty and confusion, became in popular imagination the war that restored goodness to the world. Hitchens criticises this as a simplistic interpretation of reality. He brings to light some of the uncomfortable aftermath – the Stalinist purges and the “atrocious butcher’s bill from

Indian Partition.”