Twelve Days

'Sebestyen reminds us once again why he is one of the best historians writing today' ANDREW ROBERTS, author of Churchill: Walking with DestinyIn the years after the First World War, Berlin was - as Vladimir Nabokov described it - a place 'of dangerous glamour and worldliness, of tawdry cynicism, where art and riot flourished side by side.'The Weimar Republic was Germany's postwar experiment with democracy, and a time of unprecedented cultural, intellectual and artistic freedom. Berlin was at the cutting edge of quantum physics and psychoanalysis; its nightlife showcased grand opera and dissolute cabaret. Bauhaus architecture and modernist painting flourished, and it rivalled Hollywood as a capital of film. But beneath the glamour was a deeply polarised society of extremes plagued by economic disasters, populist leaders fuelling culture wars, and an uneasy political settlement that would soon spawn the horrors of Nazism.Covering fifteen years from the end of the First World War to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933, Weimar Germany tells the definitive story of Germany's interwar republic and descent into fascism. Featuring an extraordinary cast of characters including Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, Adolf Hitler, Billy Wilder, Thomas Mann, Joseph Goebbels, Christopher Isherwood and Rosa Luxemburg, Weimar Germany is a gripping and evocative account of how the fledgling German democracy died.

An illustrated account of one of the most pivotal events in modern history - the Russian revolution of 1917.<BR><BR>In the early years of the twentieth century, Imperial Russia was an ethnically diverse empire, stretching from Ukraine and Belarus in the west to the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk in the Far East. At the head of this profoundly dysfunctional polity was Tsar Nicholas II, whose Romanov successors had ruled Russia since the start of the seventeenth century with a lethal mixture of domestic cruelty, expansionist energy and reactionary incompetence - interspersed with occasional reformist spasms.<BR><BR>By early 1917, Russia was unreformable, and the tsar's authority irreparably damaged. In March of that year, Nicholas II abdicated and the tsarist system was overthrown. The provisional government installed in its stead to organise democratic elections lasted just eight chaotic months before being ousted by Lenin's Bolsheviks in the October Revolution.<BR><BR>Writing with crisp immediacy, Sebestyen narrates an unprecedented era of political and social convulsion. The Russian Revolution changed the course of history, and, more than a century later, their backwash continues to be deeply felt across the world.