History of The Second World War
Stalingrad and Berlin - The Downfall, 1945
His second level couurse of education was pursued at Winchester College where he failed his final A-level course due to what he regards as his own 'undirected bloody-mindedness'.
From Winchester Beevor went to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, where he studied under Sir John Keegan who was himself a recognised military historian.
A regular officer 1967-70 with the 11th Hussars, he left the Army to write. He has had four novels published beginning with Violent Brink in 1975, and six works of non-fiction. They include The Spanish Civil War (1982), Crete — The Battle and the Resistance (1991), which was awarded a Runciman Prize, and Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 (written with his wife Artemis Cooper - 1994).
These early works gained some critical acceptance and seemed to offer some hope of material
rewards but it was with Beevor's Stalingrad, first published in 1998, which won the first Samuel
Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for
Literature in 1999 that his celebrity as a military historian was firmly established.
The British edition, a number one bestseller in both
hardback and paperback, has so far sold over half a million copies. The
book is also published in the United States and will be appearing in
twenty-four foreign editions. Worldwide sales exceed 1.1 million.
It was not, in fact,
his own idea to endeavour to produce Stalingrad but had the subject suggested to him by a literary editor of
some of his earlier works. Antony Beevor
has said of this work that the tactical aspects of the story had been very well covered previously but
that in terms of his own approach to the subject 'The challenge was to
put back in the detail of human experience'.
It is such reconstructions that Beevor has made his signature. Few describe with more
sympathy and pathos the quotidian business of soldiering: the lore, the rituals, the
sorrows, the joys - even the jokes.
"Those surrounded by danger do become intensely superstitious," Beevor explains. "Outsiders
sometimes fail to understand that armies are very emotional organisations; on the surface
is discipline and hierarchy but the emotions boiling underneath are terribly strong."
"Even the German army in its most murderous mode in Russia was appallingly sentimental.
Appallingly because while the troops were celebrating Christmas in Stalingrad in 1942
- and being terribly sentimental about their camaraderie, loyalty and their families at home
- they were busily starving to death Russian prisoners, who were reduced to cannibalism."
Another of his works considering the Second World War entitled
Berlin – The Downfall 1945, published in 2002, was accompanied
by a BBC Timewatch programme on his research into the subject. The book
will also be appearing in twenty-four foreign editions. It has already
been a No. 1 Bestseller in a number of countries apart from Britain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882) was, in his time, the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States. He remains widely influential to this day through his essays, lectures, poems, and philosophical writings.
In the later eighteen-twenties Ralph Waldo Emerson read, and was very significantly influenced by, a work by a French philosopher named Victor Cousin.
A key section of Cousin's work reads as follows:
… Moreover, when we have all the elements, I mean all the essential elements, their mutual relations do, as it were, discover themselves. We draw from the nature of these different elements, if not all their possible relations, at least their general and fundamental relations."
Introduction to the History of Philosophy (1829)
Even before he had first read Cousin, (in 1829), Emerson had expressed views in his private Journals which suggest that he accepted that Human Nature, and Human Beings, tend to display three identifiable aspects and orientations:
In all districts of all lands, in all the classes of communities thousands of minds are intently occupied, the merchant in his compting house, the mechanist over his plans, the statesman at his map, his treaty, & his tariff, the scholar in the skilful history & eloquence of antiquity, each stung to the quick with the desire of exalting himself to a hasty & yet unfound height above the level of his peers. Each is absorbed in the prospect of good accruing to himself but each is no less contributing to the utmost of his ability to fix & adorn human civilization. (Journal entry of December, 1824)
Our neighbours are occupied with employments of infinite diversity. Some are intent on commercial speculations; some engage warmly in political contention; some are found all day long at their books … (This dates from January - February, 1828)
The quotes from Emerson are reminiscent of a line from another "leading voice of intellectual culture" - William Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare: Henry IV (Pt 1), Act I, Scene II
Plato, Socrates and Shakespeare endorse a 'Tripartite Soul' view of Human Nature. Platos' Republic
Popular European History pages
at Age-of-the-Sage
The French Revolution of 1848
Italian Unification - Cavour, Garibaldi and the Unification of Risorgimento Italy
Otto von Bismarck & The wars of German unification
The preparation of these pages was influenced to some degree by a particular "Philosophy of History" as suggested by this quote from the famous Essay "History" by Ralph Waldo Emerson:-
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.