RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Richard Overy is the master historian of the Second World War and of what he calls the \'morbid age\' that preceded it. 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 ... One of the many virtues of Blood and Ruins is to force us to question why a war on such an enormous scale and of such appalling barbarity should have broken out at this particular moment in world history ... The first three chapters could stand alone as a history of the war. It would be difficult to overstate the brilliance with which argument and insight are interwoven in a fast-paced narrative. If the outline is familiar, Overy constantly illuminates, adjusts and sometimes challenges our conventional notions ... The reader may not agree with all his asides ... But these are niggles. Overy’s narrative of the war, with its careful attention to the uneasy relations and different priorities of both the Axis and Anglo-American alliances, its evocation of the individual human experience, and its skilful combination of battlefield detail and the \'global\' picture, is extraordinarily compelling, and written with remarkable fluency.
