One of the glorious triumvirate of World War II and founder of the strong Anglo-American friendship that is still apparent today, Winston Churchill stands out in history as a man who led his country through one of its most difficult times, with all of the steadfastness of a fierce and loyal bulldog. Churchill was already recognized as the most diversely gifted man in British politics before, at the ripe old age of 66, he suddenly emerged as a figure of world importance. Becoming Prime Minister on the very day in 1940 that Hitler invaded France and the Low Countries, he braced the British...

Civilization has long tried to limit the violence and cruelty of war. This important new book by a leading authority on ethics and war traces the recent history of these efforts, and explores key contemporary issues in this area. Best shows how the Second World War prompted reconstruction of international law, and charts the fortunes of its relations with war since then. He surveys the whole range of post-1945 armed conflict--high-tech international wars, wars of national liberation, revolutions, and civil wars--to offer an original and thought-provoking approach to contemporary history, law,...

This book contains essays within a common theme by a group of distinguished historians (some of them acknowledged world leaders in their fields) in honour of the just-retired Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, whose contribution to religion, education and history has been recognised by the award of a knighthood and, more recently, by the Order of Merit. Their common interest is the same one that has marked Professor Chadwick's life and work: the centrality of religious history to the history of Europe and, through that, to world history as a whole.

Armed force was used to make and prevent revolution in modern Europe, and as it spread it came to determine the affairs and fates of all the European nations. Beginning with the eve of the French Revolution, Geoffrey Best explains in lively detail the vast armed forces and militarized societies of the Napoleonic age. He then proceeds to analyse the contest between Europe's continuing revolutionary underground and the armies of reactionary and alien governments that culminated with the revolutions and wars of national liberation of 1848?66. Under the banners of Napoleon Bonaparte and other...

This book examines the developments in military technique and technology which both fueled and resulted from the changing nature of warfare.

An account of the foundation and growth of Queen Anne's Bounty and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and of the Church reform movement.

To no group subject to sociological and political analysis has honour seemed to matter more than to the military. Their idea of it has commonly been accepted as the most superior, open to emulation to the limited extent that different circumstances and purposes in non-military life permit.

The degeneration of this concept and of the public realm in which honour's obligations have to be observed is the subject of this book, based on the 1981 Joanne Goodman Lectures at the University of Western Ontario.

Best begins with the discovery, in the age of the American and French...