Viking, 640pp, £25
tells the story of Operation Bagration, the Russian campaign named after a Russian general, and its consequences. Starting in June Neal Ascherson. ‘But this is the most interesting. It is not about “turning points”, those diamonds of interpretation that authors love to dig up, sharpen and mount on alluring book jackets. Instead, it’s about what happened after a turning point, about the gigantic consequences as the inevitable slouched out of the future into the present…. Dimbleby parallels his military story with often devastating extracts from Russian and German diaries and private letters (including pages by Vasily Grossman, surely the most gifted writer of the whole war).’ In , Alan Mallinson wrote that Dimbleby ‘paints a vivid picture of the fighting at both the bayonet end and at high command, but rightly probes the complex relationship between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin; Books about the two wars can be ‘immensely boring and inelegantly written,’ noted Dominic Sandbrook the . ‘Dimbleby’s work is in a different league, told with such skill and judgment that, despite the harrowing subject, it is still a pleasure to read.’
