'Overy has written many fine books, but Blood and Ruins is his
masterpiece. It puts all previous single-volume works of the conflict in
the shade' Saul David, The Times
**
'This book is Richard Overy's magnum opus ... It would be difficult to
overstate the brilliance with which argument and insight are interwoven
in a fast-paced narrative' John Darwin, Times Literary Supplement
**
**A bold new approach to the Second World War from one of Britain's
foremost military historians
**
Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which
we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. He argues
that this was the 'great imperial war', a violent end to almost a
century of global imperial expansion which reached its peak in the
ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s,
before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history
and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires.
How war on a huge scale was fought, supplied, paid for, supported by
mass mobilization and morally justified forms the heart of this new
account. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in
fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked
these imperial projects, the war and its aftermath. This war was as
deadly for civilians as it was for the military, a war to the death over
the future of the global order.
Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece from of one of the most renowned
historians of the Second World War, which will compel us to view the war
in novel and unfamiliar ways. Thought-provoking, original and
challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.
