What is a twentieth-century story? There are plenty of them and many are tangled in a web of violence, uncertainty, loss and disorientation that anyone forced to cope with the century in the wrong place at the wrong time will have experienced. The gulf between private life and public sphere has been eroded by total war, civil war, forced migration, state oppression, expropriation and impoverishment, often on a colossal scale. Only remarkable luck will have earned absolute immunity from the rigours of the age. The three characters at the heart of this absorbing family narrative had less of it than they needed.

Literary Review

Nov 2009

Categories

Richard Overy

The Great Dictator?

Trial by Firestorm

Won in the Post

Fighting Tomorrow’s Battles

Art of the Deal

How One Man Escaped the Embrace of the Nazis

More by Luck Than Judgement

The Price of Peace

High Hitler

The Guns of November

The Plebeian and the Patrician

Once More unto the Breach

Last Words

Breaches of Civilisation

Blood & Soil

Conquer & Divide

His Master’s Voice

Poisonous TImes

A Man of Steel

Churchill’s Pet Boffin

A City Up In Arms

The Terrors of Totalitarianism

He Regretted Having Been So Benevolent

A Petty Bureaucrat, A Colossal Criminal

How I Won