"Lukacs convincingly portrays a leader of an empire in irreversible decline and a towering, if flawed, hero of our time."— Publishers WeeklyIn previous works, John Lukacs told the story of Winston Churchill's titanic struggle with Adolf Hitler in the early days of World War II. Now, he turns his attention to the man himself, the workings of his historical imagination, and his successes and failures as a visionary statesman.Chapter by chapter, Lukacs...

In a career spanning more than sixty-five years, John Lukacs has established himself as one of our most accomplished historians. Now, in the stimulating book History and the Human Condition, Lukacs offers his profound reflections on the very nature of history, the role of the historian, the limits of knowledge, and more.Guiding us on a quest for knowledge, Lukacs ranges far and wide over the past two centuries. The pursuit takes us from Alexis de Tocquevill...

A "gripping [and] splendidly readable" portrait of the battle within the British War Cabinet—and Churchill's eventual victory—as Hitler's shadow loomed ( The Boston Globe).From May 24 to May 28, 1940, members of Britain's War Cabinet debated whether to negotiate with Hitler or to continue what became known as the Second World War. In this magisterial work, John Lukacs takes us hour by hour into the critical events at 10 Downing Street, where Winston Church...

This day-by-day account of the maneuvering between Britain and Germany in 1940 is "a wonderful story wonderfully told" (George F. Will, New York Times-bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner).During the late spring and early summer of 1940, Hitler was poised on the edge of absolute victory, having advanced rapidly through a large part of Europe—and Britain was threatened by imminent invasion and defeat. From the acclaimed author of Five Days in Lon...

An accomplished historian delves into his own history: "An often witty and always fascinating—even entertaining—writer."— The Washington PostIn Confessions of an Original Sinner, an adroit blend of autobiography and personal philosophy, historian John Lukacs paused to set down the history of his own thoughts and beliefs. Now, in Last Rites, he continues and expands his reflections, this time integrating his conception of history a...

A distinguished historian and Budapest native offers a rich and eloquent portrait of one of the great European cities at the height of its powers.Budapest, like Paris and Vienna, experienced a remarkable exfoliation at the end of the nineteenth century. In terms of population growth, material expansion, and cultural exuberance, it was among the foremost metropolitan centers of the world, the cradle of such talents as Bartók, Kodály, Krúdy, Ady, Molnár, Koestler, Sz...

By the age of six, John Varda had already been twice a refugee. A member of the Hungarian Székely, traditionally thought to be descended from a son of Attila the Hun, his community was thrice relocated under treaty agreements as the countries of Eastern Europe jockeyed for territory, both through alliances and brute force. They were finally settled in Tolna County, Hungary, after World War II. From the ages of eight to nineteen, John was a first-hand witness to the Communist experiment, as...

In this book, originally published in 1977, John Lukacs argues that the years 1939–41 were the decisive phase of the Second World War and The Last European War describes the history of an entire continent during these two years, one of the most crucial periods in Western civilization. Unorthodox in his approach, in this book, the author looks critically at many of the myths, military and political, that still obscure the history of the Second World War. He shows how the war was ex...

The great themes woven through John Lukacs's spirited, concise history of the twentieth century are inseparable from the author's own intellectual preoccupations: the fading of liberalism, the rise of populism and nationalism, the achievements and dangers of technology, the continuing democratization of the globe, and the limitations of knowledge.

One of the most important developments of Western civilization has been the growth of historical consciousness. Consciously or not, history has become a form of thought applied to every facet of human experience; every field of human action can be studied, described, or understood through its history. In this extraordinary analysis of the meaning of the remembered past, John Lukacs discusses the evolution of historical consciousness since its first emergence about three centuries ago.

In September 1952, John Lukacs, then a young and unknown historian, wrote George Kennan (1904-2005), the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, asking one of the nation's best-known diplomats what he thought of Lukacs's own views on Kennan's widely debated idea of containing rather than militarily confronting the Soviet Union. A month later, to Lukacs's surprise, he received a personal reply from Kennan.So began an exchange of letters that would continue for more than fifty years. Lu...