Canter Bridge

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The great Churchill scholar Martin Gilbert’s ‘complete’ history of the Second World War can perhaps be faulted on only one count: plodding.

This weakness in rhetorical strategy is also the virtue that sets this history of the Second War apart from others. A glimpse at the dated chapters in the table of contents is barely enough to prepare the reader for the cumulative impact of marching month by month through this great conflagration. One skips from one military theater to the next, always aligned with the same dates. Continue Reading »

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When Wilsonian ideals met European Realpolitik in the wake of the First World War, it was already late. The soon-to-be victorious European powers were already well down the road to carving up the remains of the fallen Ottoman Empire. Continue Reading »

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In an historical moment when the ‘1967 borders’ are referred to as a simple fact—except in the offices of Hamas and their compeers—it is necessary to be reminded that these lines in the sand were the provisional conclusion of six days when blood ran plentifully around and upon them and nothing seemed obvious. Continue Reading »

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Martin Gilbert does not write small books.

It’s a good deal that we have this man around at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and that we can read the large works he gave us in the twentieth. Continue Reading »