For most of the Second World War, General Sir Alan Brooke (18831963), later Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, was Britain's Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) and Winston Churchill's principal military adviser, and antagonist, in the inner councils of war. He is commonly considered the greatest CIGS in the history of the British Army. His diariespublished here for the first time in complete and unexpurgated formare one of the most important and the most controversial military diaries of the modern era. The last great chronicle of the Second World War, they provide a riveting blow-by-blow...

The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War Two, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947, begins with the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese-the event Winston Churchill called the "worst disaster" in British military history. Japan took 80,000 British, Australian, and Indian troops as prisoners of war, throwing Britain's position in the war into further uncertainty and catapulting the empire its nadir of the war.

As in Into Battle, Todman highlights the inter-connectedness of the British experience in this moment and...