RICHARD OVERY

Allen Lane, 1040pp, £40 ‘Richard Overy is the master historian of the Second World War and of what he calls the “morbid age” that preceded it,’ wrote John Darwin in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘This book is his magnum opus (in every sense of the phrase). It is a commanding global history of the conflict that brings together its geopolitical and geostrategic elements with a stringent analysis of its many dimensions... It would be difficult to overstate the brilliance with which argument and insight are interwoven in a fast-paced narrative... Extraordinarily compelling, and written with remarkable fluency.’

Overy traces the roots of WWII back to the ‘final dynamic drive to empire’ of Germany, Italy and Japan in the late 19th century, and starts his account with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. ‘Historians tend to specialise,’ wrote Saul David in his review for the Daily Telegraph. ‘Rarely do they write as authoritatively as Overy does in fields as diverse as diplomacy, economics, battlefield tactics and war crimes. In almost every paragraph there is a telling phrase or statistic.’ Blood and

Ruins is ‘majestic and original... At almost 1,000 pages, it puts all previous single-volume works of the conflict in the shade.’

Rana Mitter, in the Critic, agreed that this is ‘perhaps the single most comprehensive account of the Second World War yet to appear in one volume. You might think that by reading extensively, you could construct a book like this one. You could not... Richard Overy has done a signal service with this compellingly written, impressively researched book.’