Books by Alistair Horne

The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. Its aim was less to defeat the enemy than bleed him to death and a battleground whose once fertile terrain is even now a haunted wilderness. Alistair Horne's classic work, continuously in print for over fifty years, is a profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the battle and the men who fought there. It shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War to the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them and the world that gave them the opportunity.

Opening with the military preparations before Paris was besieged by the invading German army in September 1870, Alistair Horne's compelling account of this dramatic episode takes the reader through the fall of Paris and German victory to the last days of the Paris Commune in May Week 1871.

General Montgomery lead the 8th Army to victory at El Alamein in 1942, and as Chief of Land Forces in the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 he received Germany's surrender in 1945. Concentrating on the momentous events of Operation Overlord from June 1944, The Lonely Leader follws Monty's leadership of the Allied offensive to Luneburg Heath the following May. Monty is a figure renowned for his military professionalism, but Alistair Horne, in association with montgomery's only son, also look at the human face of a man regarded as rather Cromwellian, considering his style of command in the context of the tactics and politics of the period, not least his controversial dealings with Eisenhower. This is a compelling account of the public and private influences of a remarkable military leader.

In 1940, the German army fought and won an extraordinary battle with France in six weeks of lightning warfare. With the subtlety and compulsion of a novel, Horne s narrative shifts from minor battlefield incidents to high military and political decisions, stepping far beyond the confines of military history to form a major contribution to our understanding of the crises of the Franco-German rivalry.To Lose a Battle is the third part of the trilogy beginning with The Fall of Paris and continuing with The Price of Glory (already available in Penguin).

The collapse of France in 1870 had an overwhelming impact on Paris, on France and on the rest of the world. People everywhere saw Paris as the centre of Europe and the hub of culture, fashion and invention. Suddenly France, not least to the disbelief of her own citizens, was gripped in the vice of the Iron Chancellor s armies and forced to surrender on humiliating terms. In this brilliant study of the Siege and its aftermath, Alistair Horne evokes the high drama of those ten fantastic months and the spiritual agony which Paris and the Parisians suffered.The Fall of Paris is the first part of the trilogy including To Lose a Battle and The Price of Glory (already available in Penguin).