Books by Norman Stone

A pacy, compelling and penetrating account from Wolfson Prize-winning author Norman Stone, that shows World War Two in a fresh new lightThe Second World War is the nightmare that sits at the heart of the modern era - a total refutation of any notion of human progress and a conflict which still haunts us seventy years on.Norman Stone's gripping new book aims to tell the narrative of the war in as brief a compass as possible, making a sometimes familiar story utterly fresh and arresting. As with his highly acclaimed World War One: A Short History, there is a compelling sense of a terrible story unfolding, of a sceptical and humorous intelligence at work, and a wish to convey to an audience who may well have no memory of the conflict just how high the stakes were.This is a beautifully written, clever and imaginative attempt to convey what can almost not be conveyed. About the author:Norman Stone is one of Britain's greatest historians. His major works include The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (winner of the Wolfson Prize and published by Penguin), Europe Transformed and The Atlantic and Its Enemies (published by Penguin). He has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Bilkent, where he is now Director of the Turkish-Russian Centre. He lives in Ankara.Reviews:'Professor Norman Stone has achieved the impossible; he has somehow written a comprehensive history of the Second World War in just under 200 pages, summarising the entire conflict while leaving out nothing of importance and bringing his lifetime of study of the subject to bear in a witty, incisive and immensely readable way ... Norman Stone has proved yet again that he is one of the most original, witty and powerful British historians writing today' Andrew Roberts, Standpoint'The joy and strength of this compact history, besides its trenchancy and, in the publishers' words, the "e;sceptical and humorous intelligence at work"e;, is its narrative clarity ... a book to clear the mind after the grand tour of the big volumes' Allan Mallinson, The Times'Novices will receive a painless introduction, but educated readers should not pass up the highly opinionated prologue and epilogue and the author's trademark acerbic commentary throughout ... Readers of all stripes ... will find plenty to ponder' Kirkus Reviews

'Do we need another history of the First World War? The answer in the case of Norman Stone's short book is, yes - because of its opinionated freshness and the unusual, sharp facts that fly about like shrapnel' Literary ReviewIn 1914 a new kind of war, and a new kind of world, came about. Fourteen million combatants died, a further twenty million were wounded, four empires were destroyed and even the victors' empires were fatally damaged. The First World War marked a revolution in the technology of slaughter as trench warfare, artillery barrages, tanks and chemical warfare made their mark on the battlefield for the first time. The sheer complexity and scale of the war have encouraged historians to write books on a similar scale. But in only 140 pages, Norman Stone distils a lifetime of teaching, arguing and thinking to reframe the overwhelming disaster whose aftershocks shaped the rest of the twentieth century. 'Bold, provocative and witty ... one of the outstanding historians of our age' Spectator'Entertaining and insightful ... one of the handful of living historians who can write with style and wit' Tibor Fischer, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

A survey of Turkey's relations with its immediate neighbours and the wider world from the 11th century to the present day. It deftly conducts the reader through this story, from the arrival of the Seljuks in Anatolia in the eleventh century to the modern republic applying for EU membership in the twenty-first.

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Those who survived the Second World War stared out onto a devastated, morally ruined world. Much of Europe and Asia had been so ravaged that it was unclear whether any form of normal life could ever be established again - coups, collapsing empires and civil wars, some on a vast scale, continued to reshape country after country long after the fighting was meant to have ended.Everywhere the 'Atlantic' world (the USA, Britain and a handful of allies) was on the defensive and its enemies on the move. For every Atlantic success there seemed to be a dozen Communist or 'Third World' successes, as the USSR and its proxies crushed dissent and humiliated the United States on both military and cultural grounds. For all the astonishing productivity of the American, Japanese and mainland western European economies (setting aside the fiasco of Britain's implosion), most of the world was either under Communist rule or lost in a violent stagnancy that seemed doomed to permanence. Even in the late 1970s, with the collapse of Iran, the oil shock and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the initiative seemed to lie with the Communist forces. Then, suddenly, the Atlantic won - economically, ideologically, militarily - with astonishing speed and completeness.The Atlantic and Its Enemies is a surprising, highly entertaining and pugnacious history of this tumultuous period.

'Without question one of the classics of post-war historical scholarship, Stone's boldly conceived and brilliantly executed book opened the eyes of a generation of young British historians raised on tales of the Western trenches to the crucial importance of the Eastern Front in the First World War' Niall Ferguson 'Scholarly, lucid, entertaining, based on a thorough knowledge of Austrian and Russian sources, it sharply revises traditional assumptions about the First World War.' Michael Howard