The Origins Of The Second World War

Before the Second World War became a fixed moral landmark in every schoolbook, A. J. P. Taylor did the historian’s most dangerous thing: he asked awkward questions about how it actually happened.

The Origins of the Second World War is one of those books that arrives carrying both scholarship and controversy in its luggage. Taylor examines diplomacy, appeasement, treaties, miscalculation, ambition, weakness, and the uneasy machinery of Europe between the wars. It is not a battlefield history, but a study of the road to catastrophe, which is often more uncomfortable.

There is a sharp irony here. Wars are often explained afterwards as inevitable, as if history were a railway line with no points. Taylor is much more interested in the muddle: bad judgement, competing national interests, missed chances, bluff, fear, and leaders who thought they were controlling events right up until events controlled them.

This good Penguin copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books, is ideal for readers of modern history, diplomatic history, Second World War origins, and anyone who enjoys history that still has the power to start an argument decades after publication.

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