Correlli Barnett

"The Verdict of Peace describes how, between the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 and the Suez debacle in 1956, Britain threw away her last opportunity to reinvent herself as an industrial nation state before old rivals such as Germany and Japan finally recovered from wartime defeat. It describes how Britain still suffered, ten years after the Second World War, from old-fashioned industries, hidebound management, trade union blocking of technical change and self-destructive strikes. It analyses Britain's ominous failure to win market domination in new technologies such as aeronautics, business systems and computers."--Jacket.

"In The Audit of War Correlli Barnett places Britain's decline since the Second World War in a startling new perspective. He shows that Britain's wartime industrial performance, far from marking a supreme achievement of national genius and effort, was in reality characterised by all the classic symptoms of the 'British disease'--incompetent management, obstructive trade unions, restrictive practices, wildcat strikes, old-fashioned plant, chronic shortages of skilled personnel, and appalling weaknesses in the newest technologies"--Book jacket.

Interprets the major events of World War I through an analysis of the actions and characters of four supreme commanders, Ludendorff, Petain, Jellicoe, and Moltke.

An account of the famous North African desert battle, between the German forces led by Rommel, the Desert Fox, and the British Eighth Army, which was pivotal to possession of important oil reserves.

With few exceptions, historians of Germany's conduct of World War II have concentrated on Adolf Hitler and on his talents and mistakes as a warlord. This authoritative study probes instead the relationship between Hitler and his generals -- men such as Rommel, Model, Student, Beck, and Keitel -- from the point of view of his staff. In Hitler's Generals, Correlli Barnett has gathered an outstanding team of military historians to document as never before the characters and careers of the high command who translated the Führer's directives into the dazzling victories of 1939-41 and who endured so long against heavy odds. These vivid portraits assess each man's military abilities, display his professional and social background, and portray how he reacted to Hitler's personality and style of leadership. - Jacket flap.

The theme of this book is the decisive effect of individual human character on history. The background, in sharpest contrast, is a sudden and violent transition to mass collectivised life - to twentieth-century industry civilisation. The principal actors are four national commanders-in-chief: two German, one Frenchman, one Englishman. Theirs was the novel task of directing these new and terrifying forces of mass power in battle. Each had been born and bred in the last age; each belonged to a highly conservative profession. Their abilities and defects reflected and illustrated those of their countries.

"'The summer of 1940 marked the consummation of an astonishing decline in British fortunes. The British invested their feebleness and isolation with a romantic glamour - they saw themselves as latter-day Spartans, under their own Leonidas, holding the pass for the civlised world. In fact, it was a sorry and contemptible plight for a great power, and it derived neither from bad luck, nor from the failures of others. It had been brought down upon the British by themselves.' Once...the British were thoroughly hard-nosed and aggressive about foreign plicy, but with Wellington's victory at Waterloo, there appeared the first signs of a moral change that was to leave them fatally unprepared to meet the challenges of the determined imperialists guiding other nations in the twentieth century."--Taken from book jacket flap.