Dimensions
140 x 223 x 23mm
Imaginary History from Twelve Leading Historians.
A dozen star historians on what might have happened at history's turning points . . . if the dice had fallen differently.
Throughout history, great and terrible events have often hinged upon sheer luck. Tiny changes to great enterprises can produce profoundly different results. We all ask "what might have been?" about our own lives, now award-winning historian Andrew Roberts has assembled a team of twelve leading historians and biographers and asked them what might have happened if major world events had gone differently?
Each concentrating in the area in which they are a leading authority, historians as distinguished as Antonia Fraser ('Gunpowder Plot'), Norman Stone ('Sarajevo 1914') and Anne Somerset ('The Spanish Armada') consider: "What if . . .?"
In her first publication since her acclaimed 'Georgiana', Amanda Foreman muses on Lincoln's Northern States of America and Lord Palmerston's Great Britain going to war, as they so nearly did in 1861. Whether it's Stalin fleeing Moscow in 1941 (Simon Sebag Montefiore), or Napoleon not being forced to retreat from it in 1812 (Adam Zamoyski), the events covered here are important, world-changing ones.
George W Bush's former White House advisor David Frum considers a President Al Gore's response to 9/11, while Simon Heffer posits a Heseltine premiership had Margaret Thatcher been assassinated by the IRA in Brighton. Conrad Black wonders how the United States might have entered the Second World War if the Japanese had not bombed Pearl Harbor.
All twelve essays are thought-provoking and scholarly, some of them pose a fascinating and often horrifying parallel universe - a universe that so easily just might have been.
