Richard Overy
Turning Points?
Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East
By David Stahel
Cambridge University Press 468pp £25 order from our bookshop
The Battle of Midway
By Craig L Symonds
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December 1941: Twelve Days that Began a World War
By Evan Mawdsley
Yale University Press 347pp £25 order from our bookshop
The idea that the Second World War had a ‘turning point’ or ‘turning points’ has become a historians’ parlour game. But what exactly does it mean? Few other major events have attracted the same curiosity. A turning point in the French Revolution? The Crusades? The suffragette movement? It is possible to identify continuities and discontinuities; to search out periods of accelerated change; to reflect on the narrative as a complex process of interaction between historical actors and historical context, between individual initiative and the contingent pressures that limit or advance it. But a turning point?
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.