The inter-war years were, at the time, perceived to be years of crisis across the world. The First World War, 'the war to end all wars', had solved nothing and its legacy was a world full of unresolved disputes and manifest ambiguities. Overy examines the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic crisis which struck at the very foundations of the capitalist world, and seeks to explain why dictatorships came to supplant democracy in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Baltic States and the Balkans, and why the world slid into war once more in 1939.

Author Biography

R. J. Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has written numerous books on the Third Reich, the Second World War and air warfare including: The Air War 1939-1945 (2nd ed., 2006), Why the Allies Won (2nd ed., 2006) and The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (2004) which won both the Wolfson and the Hessell Tiltman Prizes for History in 2005.