Challenge to Civilization

From Britain’s ‘greatest living factual historian’ (Paul Johnson, Evening Standard), the third and final volume of his magisterial global history of the twentieth century.

Martin Gilbert is Britain’s leading popular historian. His three-volume History of the Twentieth Century is a complete global narrative history of our century. He is the undisputed master of narrative history with an extraordinary ability to muster detailed facts into rich and compelling prose. Volume II ended in 1951, as the world recovered from the devastation of World War II and the nuclear threat increased. This, his third and final volume, takes us up to the present day, weaving a rich historical narrative of the multifarious and contradictory events of the last fifty years, which ranges across the bloody events of many wars (from Korea to Bosnia), the post-war resurrection of Europe and the United Nations, the Arms Race, the shooting of JFK, the advent of computerisation, Man’s arrival on the moon, Aids and heart transplants, Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is history which makes sense of the most destructive yet most creative century humanity has ever experienced.