Yes, the manuscript was confiscated when it had just been written in 1960. But this is his novel, Life and Fate, which was considered highly controversial and banned in Russia. The first book you’ve chosen is a novel by someone whose work you know very well indeed – the Russian writer Vasily Grossman. We always think about those who have died and the casualties of war without fully appreciating how the decisions of Stalin or Hitler changed everybody’s lives.īy Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler Read That suddenly raised so many other questions for me.

In fact it was a German farmer’s wife who had fallen desperately in love with a French prisoner of war who had been working on their farm and she’d followed him back to France by smuggling herself on to the train carrying deported prisoners back to France. After six months of waiting for permission from the Ministry of the Interior I came across this report from the security police describing how a German woman had been found in Paris in the summer of 1945. The most important lesson I ever learned came to me in the French archives when I was researching a book about Paris after the liberation. But World War II continues to be the most important war in history because of the effect that it had on so many people’s lives and on so many countries. To start off with I was particularly interested in the Napoleonic Wars and I will eventually go back to them when, for me, World War II is finally over. What is it that makes you particularly interested in World War II? From my point of view John Keegan’s book was the greatest influence because it pushed me in the direction where I was eventually heading, of trying to integrate history from above with history from below. I was always rather dubious about oral history because I felt it had no proper context. Then, interestingly, there was a period afterwards when suddenly oral history started to become fashionable. It was the first time that military history had been written as history from below. Up until then military history had usually been written by retired officers or generals, trying to make out that commanders were chess grandmasters playing some brilliant game, when in fact it was all chaos and fear and smoke. The very first historian to inspire me was John Keegan, who I studied under at Sandhurst, because he wrote The Face of Battle, which was one of the key moments in the turning points of military history.

But I was wondering, which historians inspire you? You have won numerous awards, sold millions of copies of your books and had them translated into lots of different languages. Foreign Policy & International Relations.

Life and fate