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“... and her ability to adapt her features – even the shape of her face – so radically that, as Antony Beevor observes, she looked like a different person in each role that she played. In April 1921 she attended the premiere of her first German movie, Schloss Vogelöd, directed by Murnau: it launched her career as ‘Die Tschechowa’. She acted in ...”

“... In his account of D-Day Antony Beevor comes to many surprising conclusions: that the Germans were by far the better soldiers, more experienced, disciplined and confident; that their weapons were generally better, not just the Tiger and Panther tanks and the 88mm anti-tank gun but even their MG42 light machinegun, which was far superior to its British and American equivalents; that the Allies shot many prisoners and committed all manner of atrocities; that French civilians caught in the middle often suffered more from the Allied onslaught ...”

“... suffering in a work of history without howling like Solzhenitsyn? This is the challenge taken up Antony Beevor in Stalingrad. Beevor maps out the strategic scheme as seen from above, but also gives the view from ground level, with the help of voluminous accounts from the people involved. He has done his research on ...”

“... Soviet shells were falling. But that apocalyptic place seemed as dead and remote as Küstrin. Antony Beevor cannot bring that Berlin back to life. But he has constructed a staggering diorama of how it was in those months between the Soviet crossing of the Vistula in January 1945 and the silence that fell in ruined Berlin almost five months ...”

“... and of a civilian population cowering in icy buildings where the water pipes had frozen solid. As Antony Beevor remarks in The Battle for Spain (2006), ‘conditions in Stalingrad, five years later, would not be much worse.’ Neugass has you feel the cold. He was taken on as a driver – a ‘chófer’, as he calls himself – by the American Medical ...”

“... days of ferocious but doomed resistance, barely a fifth of the Paras survived and avoided capture. Antony Beevor, in Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, describes the over-elaborate airborne assault as ‘a very bad plan right from the start’.* Beevor’s intricate account covers the involvement of American and Polish ...”

“... What are we to make of the Red Army? On the one hand, it was the force that first stopped and then destroyed the armies of German National Socialism, in achieving which Russian soldiers suffered in ways that exceed the limits of Western imagination: the toll of dead – more than eight million – reveals numbers as the abstraction they are. And for much of the war those killed in combat were the lucky ones: the Germans let three million prisoners starve to death ...”

“... modernist ambition and postmodernist decentredness – a fake, perhaps, but an interesting one. As Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova’s’s superb book A Writer at War makes clear,* Grossman saw more of the war than any of them; more than any other writer. He volunteered to fight but, tubby and shortsighted and unathletic as he was, was sent instead to ...”

“... John Keegan’s The Face of Battle are the mini-masterpieces I remember from school; this century, Antony Beevor, Max Hastings and Holland have led the British pack. The history of war is now certainly more palatable to academia: King’s College, London has a very reputable Department of War Studies. This type of military history, contextualised, nuanced ...”

“... after Secrets of Marie Antoinette in 1985, The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier in 1991 and Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper’s Paris after the Liberation, the last book she worked on before she died in 1994, finding a felicitous ending for it on her deathbed. Susan Sontag’s idea of Paris came from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Harriet ...”

“... Terror. One element in Wolf Hall’s success as it is an element in the success of the work of Antony Beevor is the regular and unflinching presentation of horror. There may be cornflowers on Cromwell’s desk but this is a novel about torture, tyranny and death. 11 June. Drive round to Camden Town to shop and go to the bank where I draw out £1500 to ...”