Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe
A two-book collection of Max Hastings’ bestselling works about the 20th century’s most terrible global conflicts.
‘Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914’: In this centenary year, Hastings’ thrilling and also deeply moving account seeks to explain both how Europe plunged into what was then called ‘The Great War’, what befell the millions of people of many nations caught up in the first months on the battlefield and as civilian victims.
‘All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945’: This is ‘everyman’s story’ of 1939-45 from a host of viewpoints across the world- British fighter pilots and Russians tanker crew, Chinese peasants and French housewives, American naval gunners and Italian partisans. Here, with an extraordinary blend of top-down and bottom-up testimony is Hastings’s acclaimed answer to the question ‘what was World War II like?’
Praise for ‘Catastrophe’: -
”'Magnificent … Hastings writes with an enviable grasp of pace and balance, as well as an acute eye for human detail. Even for readers who care nothing for the difference between a battalion and a division, his book is at once moving, provocative and utterly engrossing” - Sunday Times
”'Masterly … Hastings is a brilliant guide to that strange, febrile twilight before Europe plunged into darkness. This is history-writing at its best, scholarly and fluent … for anyone wanting to understand how that ghastly, much-misunderstood conflict came about, there could be no better place to start than this fine book” - The Times
”'One could scarcely ask for a better guide to these horrors than Max Hastings … he is a superb writer with a rare gift for evoking the rhythm, mood and raw physical terror of battle … If you are looking for a humane and compelling interpretative chronicle of the formative months of this horrific conflict, you will find none better” - Mail on Sunday
Praise for ‘All Hell Let Loose’: -
”'This is the book he was born to write: a work of staggering scope and erudition, narrated with supreme fluency and insight, it is unquestionably the best single-volume history of the war ever written” - Sunday Times
”'No other general history of the war amalgamates so successfully the gut-wrenching personal details and the essential strategic arguments. Melding the worm’s eye view and the big picture is a difficult trick to pull of - but Hastings has triumphed” - The Times
”'A fast-moving, highly readable survey of the entire war…Hastings combines a mastery of the military events with invariably sound judgement and a sharp eye for unusual telling detail … this is military history at its most gripping” - Evening Standard