Sometimes the less said the better! All you need to know about World War II and The British empire

  • Short, 100-page books digest the history of the British empire and World War
  • Max Hastings’ book on World War II whisks readers through the war's key events
  • While Pier Brendon's book is filled with anecdotes about the British empire

All You Need to Know...World War II by Max Hastings

...The British empire by Piers Brendon (Connell £9.99 each)  

Every week on review pages like this one, I’m inspired by accounts of all the ‘essential’ and ‘authoritative’ books I ought to be reading. My shelves and conscience groan in unison under the weight of huge history books for which I’ve never found the stamina.

Mercifully, a new series of brisk books called ‘All You Need To Know . . .’ reduces longer works into easily digestible paperbacks of just over 100 pages each.

These kinds of bluffer’s guide are often written in the dry, bullet-pointy style of GCSE textbooks. But the masterstroke of series editor Jolyon Connell lies in his enlistment of experts who maintain their literary verve and sharp opinions in short form.

These short 100-page books give an easily digestible version of events such as World War II (pictured) and the British empire

These short 100-page books give an easily digestible version of events such as World War II (pictured) and the British empire

Max Hastings’ book on World War II whisks us through the timeline, from the invasion of Poland to the bombing of Nagasaki in 19 chapters, with titles such as ‘Italy: High Hopes, Sour Fruits’ and ‘The Bear Turns: Russia In 1943’.

Military strategies are crisply praised or condemned while Hastings delivers thumbnail verdicts on the major players.

He writes of the occasionally ‘histrionic’ Winston Churchill’s construction of a ‘brilliant and narrowly plausible narrative for the British people’, and Stalin’s ‘icy clarity of vision’. He also unearths the facts we’d rather forget.

The chapter on the Holocaust reminds us that while Churchill denounced the Nazi extermination programme, his government was unwilling to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees.

When Americans were polled over whether to grant special immigration rights to Jewish fugitives in 1938, 77 per cent said no.

The British empire by Piers Brendon (Connell £9.99)

The British empire by Piers Brendon (Connell £9.99)

Giving engaging space to the experiences of ordinary people, Hastings quotes the letter of a U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant stationed in the South Pacific, dreaming of coming home: ‘I’m going to start wearing pyjamas again, I’m going to polish off a few eggs and several quarts of milk . . . But I’m saving the best for last — I’m going to spend a whole day flushing a toilet, just to hear the water run.’

And he includes the account of a British army officer’s wife as she met her husband at a station in Berkshire, after a long separation during which they had learned his brother Pat had been killed in action: ‘His strangely thin face glimpsed in the dimmest light gave me a feeling of artificiality. Even in our kisses there was something unreal.

‘In bed there was a terrible sadness to overcome — Pat’s death — before we could make love. When at last he turned to me we made love as if we were partners in a solemn rite, strange, speechless, but familiar.’

Piers Brendon’s Empire book is equally lively, packed full of eye-opening anecdotes. He moves deftly from the Elizabethan sea dogs — ‘who equated plunder with patriotism and profit with Protestantism’ — to the politicians who stood ‘lachrymose in the monsoon rain’ at the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.