Brendan Simms

Este libro ofrece una biografía política e intelectual de Hitler, desde su primera concepción de la historia de Alemania y su papel en el mundo a raíz de la derrota en la Primera Guerra Mundial, hasta el convencimiento de que el principal enemigo no era ni el comunismo ni la Union Sovietica, ni tampoco el judaismo internacional, como se ha repetido hasta ahora, sino el capitalismo anglosajon y, principalmente, Estados Unidos. Mientras que la mayoria de los historiadores han argumentado que Hitler subestimo la amenaza estadounidense, Simms muestra que Hitler se embarco en una guerra preventiva contra Estados Unidos precisamente porque lo consideraba el principal adversario y el unico que podia destruir Alemania. El dominio nazi sobre la practica totalidad de Europa, la guerra contra la URSS y la aniquilacion de los judios europeos eran capitulos de una carrera contrarreloj para convertir al III Reich en una potencia capaz de enfrentarse al liderazgo anglosajon y, si no vencerlo, llegar al menos a un mundo bipolar equilibrado entre el descarnado capitalismo financiero anglosajon y el Reich aleman enraizado en la tradicion racial germanica. Hitler es una lectura poderosamente argumentada y definitiva que permite comprender la mente de un tirano asesino del que pensabamos que ya

La vie d’Hitler est certes l’un des récits les plus stupéfiants du XXe siècle. Brendan Simms, dans une biographie originale, en renouvelle la perspective en mettant l’accent sur la dimension internat

La vie d’Hitler est certes l’un des récits les plus stupéfiants du XXe siècle. Brendan Simms, dans une biographie originale, en renouvelle la perspective en mettant l’accent sur la dimension internat

History at its scintillating best ... hard-hitting, revelatory and superbly researched Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with DestinyA rare achievement ... sure to become an instant classic John Lewis Gaddis, Yale UniversityThis gripping book dramatizes the extraordinarily compressed and terrifying period between the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitlers declaration of war on the United States. These five days transformed much of the world and have shaped our own experience ever since. Simms and Ladermans aim in the book is to show how this agonizing period had no inevitability about it and that innumerable outcomes were possible. Key leaders around the world were taking decisions with often poor and confused information, under overwhelming pressure and knowing that they could be facing personal and national disaster. And yet, there were also long-standing assumptions that shaped these decisions, both consciously and unconsciously.Hitlers American Gamble is a superb work of history, both as an explanation for the course taken by the Second World War and as a study in statecraft and political choices.

A dazzling perspective on the current EU referendum debateProspect MagazineBritain has always had a tangled, complex, paradoxical role in Europes history. It has invaded and been invaded, changed sides, stood aloof, acted with both brazen cynicism and the cloudiest idealism. Every century troops from the British isles have marched across the mainland in pursuit of a great complex of different goals, foremost among them the intertwined defence of parliamentary liberty in Britain and the Liberties of Europe. Dynastically Britain has been closely linked to countries as varied as Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and France.In this bracing and highly enjoyable book, Brendan Simms describes the highlights and low-points in the Euro-British encounter, from the Dark Ages to the present. The critical importance of understanding this history is shown in the final chapter, which dramatizes the issues around British relations with the European Union and the how, far from being a narrowly legalistic or financial concern, a referendum on continued membership raises all kinds of fascinating questions about both the United Kingdoms own horizons and what it can offer to the Unions vision of itself.Britains Europe is a vital intervention at a moment of both great danger and great opportunity.

A superb little book that is micro-history at its bestWashington PostThe brevity of this remarkable book belies the amount of work that went into it. One can only marvel at how well Professor Simms has gone through the original sources - the surviving journals, reminiscences and letters of the individual combatants - to produce a coherent and gripping narrative Nick Lezard, GuardianThe true story, told minute by minute, of the soldiers who defeated Napoleon - from Brendan Simms, acclaimed author of Europe: The Struggle for SupremacyEurope had been at war for over twenty years. After a short respite in exile, Napoleon had returned to France and threatened another generation of fighting across the devastated and exhausted continent. At the small Belgian village of Waterloo two large, hastily mobilized armies faced each other to decide the future of Europe.Unknown either to Napoleon or Wellington the battle would be decided by a small, ordinary group of British and German troops given the task of defending the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte. This book tells their extraordinary story, brilliantly recapturing the fear, chaos and chanciness of battle and using previously untapped eye-witness reports. Through determination, cunning and fighting spirit, some four hundred soldiers held off many thousands of French and changed the course of history.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE 2020A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019A revelatory new biography of Adolf Hitler from the acclaimed historian Brendan SimmsAdolf Hitler is one of the most studied men in history, and yet the most important things we think we know about him are wrong. As Brendan Simmss major new biography shows, Hitlers main preoccupation was not, as widely believed, the threat of Bolshevism, but that of international capitalism and Anglo-America. These two fears drove both his anti-semitism and his determination to secure the living space necessary to survive in a world dominated by the British Empire and the United States. Drawing on new sources, Brendan Simms traces the way in which Hitlers ideology emerged after the First World War. The United States and the British Empire were, in his view, models for Germanys own empire, similarly founded on appropriation of land, racism and violence. Hitlers aim was to create a similarly global future for Germany - a country seemingly doomed otherwise not just to irrelevance, but, through emigration and foreign influence, to extinction. His principal concern during the resulting cataclysm was not just what he saw as the clash between German and Jews, or German and Slav, but above all that between Germans and what he called the Anglo-Saxons. In the end only dominance of the world would have been enough to achieve Hitlers objectives, and it ultimately required a coalition of virtually the entire world to defeat him. Brendan Simmss new book is the first to explain Hitlers beliefs fully, demonstrating how, as ever, it is ideas that are the ultimate source of the most murderous behaviour.

For most of 1992-1995, Britain stood aside while an internationally recognised state was attacked by externally-sponsored rebels bent on a campaign of territorial aggression and ethnic cleansing. It was her unfinest hour since 1938. Based on interviews with many of the chief participants, parliamentary debates, and a wide range of sources, Brendan Simms brilliant study traces the roots of British policy and the highly sophisticated way in which the government sought to minimise the crisis and defuse popular and American pressure for action. We all continue to live with the results of these shameful actions to this day.

Studded with brilliant vignettes and arresting insights, Simmss marvellous narrative presents an original and provocative account not only of the rise and decline of British eighteenth-cetury imperial power, but also of the processes that formed the modern global system Christopher ClarkThis highly original, extremely enjoyable book tells the story of Britains extraordinary scramble to world power in the 18th century and how, through hubris and incompetence, it lost almost everything it had gained. Whilst Britain was an important European power, few would have expected her global preeminence by 1760, but as Brendan Simms shows with great flair and originality, Britain had a crucial card to play. It was the joining of the British crown to Hanover that gave Britain two empires: one scattered around the world and another the more important of the two - firmly locked into Germany. Having created a new empire Britain then spectacularly lost it, this time because of its chaotic failure to maintain its European alliances. This is an epic and often unexpected story, and Simms tells it brilliantly.

Half a millennium of European warfare brilliantly retold by masterly historian Brendan SimmsAt the heart of Europes history lies a puzzle. In most of the world humankind has created enormous political frameworks, whether ancient (such as China) or modern (such as the United States). Sprawling empires, kingdoms or republics appear to be the norm. By contrast Europe has remained stubbornly chaotic and fractured into often amazingly tiny pieces, with each serious attempt to unify the continent (by Charles V, Napoleon and Hitler) thwarted.In this marvelously ambitious and exciting new book, Brendan Simms tells the story of Europes constantly shifting geopolitics and the peculiar circumstances that have made it both so impossible to dominate, but also so dynamic and ferocious. It is the story of a group of highly competitive and mutually suspicious dynasties, but also of a continent uniquely prone to interference from semi-detached elements, such as Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Britain and (just as centrally to Simms argument) the United States.Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy will become the standard work on this crucial subject - and an extremely enjoyable one.Reviews:This is a brilliant and beautifully written history. From the Holy Roman Empire to the Euro, Brendan Simms shows that one of the constant preoccupations of Europeans has always been the geography, the power and the needs of Germany. Europe is a work of extraordinary scholarship delivered with the lightest of touches. It will be essential, absorbing reading for anyone trying to understand both the past and the present of one of the most productive and most dangerous continents on earthWilliam ShawcrossWorld history is German history, and German history is world history.This is the powerful case made by this gifted historian of Europe, whose expansive erudition revives the proud tradition of the history of geopolitics, and whose immanent moral sensibility reminds us that human choices made in Berlin (and London) today about the future of Europe might be decisive for the future of the world Timothy Snyder (author of Bloodlands)About the author:Brendan Simms is Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. His major books include Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize) and Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire.

Eighty years after the stunning and decisive battle, a revelatory new history of MidwayThe Battle of Midway was, on paper, an improbable victory for the smaller, less experienced American navy and air force, so much so that it was quickly described as a miracle. Yet fortune favored the Americans at Midway, and the conventional wisdom has it that the Americans lucky streak continued as the war in the Pacific turned against the Japanese. This new history demonstrates that luck, let alone miracles, had little to do with it. In The Silver Waterfall, Brendan Simms and Steven McGregor show how the efforts of Americas peacetime navy combined with creative innovations made by designers and industrialists were largely responsible for the victory. The Douglas Dauntless Dive Bomber, a uniquely conceived fighting weapon, delivered a brutally accurate attack the Japanese quickly came to dread. Told through a vivid narrative, Simms and McGregor show how the course of the war in the Pacific was dramatically altered, emphasizing the crucial combination of a culture of innovation, a brilliant contribution from immigrants, and a vital intelligence coup that allowed the navy to orchestrate the devastating attack on the Japanese and dominate the Pacific for good.

Este libro ofrece una biografía política e intelectual de Hitler, desde su primera concepción de la historia de Alemania y su papel en el mundo a raíz de la derrota en la Primera Guerra Mundial, hasta el convencimiento de que el principal enemigo no era ni el comunismo ni la Union Sovietica, ni tampoco el judaismo internacional, como se ha repetido hasta ahora, sino el capitalismo anglosajon y, principalmente, Estados Unidos. Mientras que la mayoria de los historiadores han argumentado que Hitler subestimo la amenaza estadounidense, Simms muestra que Hitler se embarco en una guerra preventiva contra Estados Unidos precisamente porque lo consideraba el principal adversario y el unico que podia destruir Alemania. El dominio nazi sobre la practica totalidad de Europa, la guerra contra la URSS y la aniquilacion de los judios europeos eran capitulos de una carrera contrarreloj para convertir al III Reich en una potencia capaz de enfrentarse al liderazgo anglosajon y, si no vencerlo, llegar al menos a un mundo bipolar equilibrado entre el descarnado capitalismo financiero anglosajon y el Reich aleman enraizado en la tradicion racial germanica. Hitler es una lectura poderosamente argumentada y definitiva que permite comprender la mente de un tirano asesino del que pensabamos que ya lo sabiamos todo.Este libro ofrece una biografía política e intelectual de Hitler, desde su primera concepción de la historia de Alemania y su papel en el mundo a raíz de la derrota en la Primera Guerra Mundial, hasta el convencimiento de que el principal enemigo no era ni el comunismo ni la Union Sovietica, ni tampoco el judaismo internacional, como se ha repetido hasta ahora, sino el capitalismo anglosajon y, principalmente, Estados Unidos. Mientras que la mayoria de los historiadores han argumentado que Hitler subestimo la amenaza estadounidense, Simms muestra que Hitler se embarco en una guerra preventiva contra Estados Unidos precisamente porque lo consideraba el principal adversario y el unico que podia destruir Alemania. El dominio nazi sobre la practica totalidad de Europa, la guerra contra la URSS y la aniquilacion de los judios europeos eran capitulos de una carrera contrarreloj para convertir al III Reich en una potencia capaz de enfrentarse al liderazgo anglosajon y, si no vencerlo, llegar al menos a un mundo bipolar equilibrado entre el descarnado capitalismo financiero anglosajon y el Reich aleman enraizado en la tradicion racial germanica. Hitler es una lectura poderosamente argumentada y definitiva que permite comprender la mente de un tirano asesino del que pensabamos que ya lo sabiamos todo.