A CONFLICT LIKE NO OTHER, it has come to define the very idea of war itself. Great power rivalry prepared the ground, yet so did bitter ethnic disputes following the collapse of four empires, as did the ideological clash between Fascism and Communism. More than any other, the Second World War was dominated, in the age of totalitarianism, by leaders who determined the course of events in a way we have not seen since then - and thought we would never see again.

Using the most up-to-date scholarship and research, Antony Beevor assembles the whole picture in a gripping narrative that extends from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and from the snowbound steppe to the North African Desert. Despite the titanic scale of his canvas, he never loses sight of the fates of the ordinary men and women whose lives were scattered by inexorable forces.