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Kelly's account captures a key moment in Western history -- the critical six months in 1940 when Winston Churchill debated whether the British would fight Hitler.
London in April 1940 was a place of great fear and conflict. Everyone was on edge; civilization itself seemed imperiled. The Germans were marching. They had taken Poland, France, Holland, Belgium and Czechoslovakia. They now menaced Britain. Should Britain negotiate with Germany? The members of the War Cabinet were divided.
Drawing on the War Cabinet papers, other government documents, private diaries, newspaper accounts and memoirs, Kelly tells the story of the summer of 1940 — the months of the “Supreme Question” of whether or not the British were to surrender.
Kelly takes readers from the battlefield to Parliament, to the government ministries, to the British high command, to the desperate Anglo-French conference in Paris and London, to the American embassy in London and to life with the ordinary Britons.
Kelly specializes in narrative history. He is the author of "The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People," "The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death" and "Three on the Edge."
Oblong Books is at 6422 Montgomery St. For more information, visit http://www.oblongbooks.com.
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