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Synopsis

The history of the Second World War, with its horrible twists and turns, is so well known that the major events and their outcomes have taken on a sort of inevitability. It has become, in effect, a tragedy with each leader and each country playing an assigned part.

Ian Kershaw's extraordinarily thought-provoking and gripping new book, Fateful Choices, demolishes any such sense of inevitability. He examines closely eleven episodes at the heart of the War where there was an immense range of options open to planners and decision-makers. From declarations of war down to operational priorities, choices were made that could have resulted in an almost unrecognisably different conflict. Other viewpoints were passionately and articulately argued by powerful, ruthless advocates. In no case was the decision that prevailed to any degree foreordained.

Kershaw, not least through his immense work on the career of Adolf Hitler, has spent many years thinking about the contingent nature of history. Fateful Choices dramatizes brilliantly and distressingly events that between them could have resulted in disaster or victory - either for the Allies or for the Axis.

Reviews

Critic Review:

'Kershaw's book...represents a splendidly lucid and impeccably argued exposition of the greatest political decisions of the Second World War.'
Sunday Times (Culture)

'Hitler's greatest living biographer ... deeply researched, well-written and powerfully argued ... This book - astonishingly for something written so long after the event and on top of so many other works on the subject - actually alters our overall perspective of the Second World War.'
Evening Standard

'A model of scholarship.'
Literary Review

'How fortunate that it is Ian Kershaw bringing his immense knowledge and clarity of thought to the task … brilliantly explained … an immensely wise book.'
The Guardian

'Kershaw displays here those same qualities of scholarly rigour, careful argument and sound judgement that he brought to bear so successfully in his life of Hitler.'
Sunday Telegraph

'The UK's, if not the world, premier historian of the Nazi era.'
John Crace, The Guardian

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