The World at War and the Coming of the Peace

Is there a single volume that could possibly encompass all that the Second World War was, and meant? Surely not. And yet, from one generation to the next, scholars have striven to produce such a work, although even the best of them inevitably falls short in one regard or the other, revealing as they do the historiographical approaches of their era. For example, when (almost 60 years ago) this reviewer was assisting the great military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart in the completion of his History of the Second World War (1970), the approach of that work and so many like it was usually rather narrow, concerned with military operations and campaigns—the Desert War, the Battle of the Atlantic, Guadalcanal, and so on. Liddell Hart's magnificent private library at States House, Medmenham, som