History of the 20th Century

From Britain’s ‘greatest living factual historian’ (Paul Johnson, Evening Standard), his magisterial global history of the twentieth century.

Martin Gilbert is Britain’s leading popular historian. His History of the Twentieth Century is a complete global narrative history of our century. The undisputed master of narrative history, he has an extraordinary ability to muster detailed facts into rich and compelling prose. He retells the events of this, the most horrifying and surprising century that the world has ever experienced, and makes sense of them in a global (and personal) context. As the countries of the world fought and recovered from two World Wars. This single-volume history takes us up to the present day, weaving a rich historical narrative of the multifarious and contradictory events of the last century , which ranges across the bloody events of many wars (from Korea to Bosnia), the post-war resurrection of Europe and the United Nations, the Arms Race, the shooting of JFK, the advent of computerisation, Man’s arrival on the moon, Aids and heart transplants, Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is history which makes sense of the most destructive yet most creative century humanity has ever experienced.

‘A mammoth undertaking, a miracle of dense compression, demonstrating a sense of proportion sustained with extraordinary self-discipline and a capacity to absorb, digest and shape a mountain of miscellaneous material… A salient and invaluable reference book, austerely non-judgmental, lucid and measured.’ PHILIP ZIEGLER, Daily Telegraph