‘Splendid history. A brilliantly clear and accessible account of the war in all its theaters. Roberts’s descriptions of soldiers and officers are masterly and humane, and his battlefield set pieces are as gripping as any I have read. He has visited many of the battlefields, and has an unusually good eye for detail as well as a painterly skill at physical description. He is just as much at home at sea as on land; from Midway to El Alamein his prose is unerringly precise and strikingly vivid. It is hard to imagine a better-told military history of World War II. Though the counterfactuals in Roberts’s conclusion provoke thought, the real interest of his book resides in its robustly conventional virtues – scholarly dedication to the sources, humane identification with the soldiers and remarkably effective prose.’
Timothy Snyder, The New York Times Book Review

‘Roberts is a great historian, as distinct from a merely distinguished one, because of a rare triune mastery: of the movement of history, in both its broad sweep and particular revelatory detail; a felicitous prose style and gift for narrative; and a commanding moral vision. Edward Gibbon had it, so did his contemporary David Hume. Winston Churchill — a hero for Roberts — had it too.’
Roger Kimball, The Daily

‘The prolific Andrew Roberts, who could not write a dull sentence if he tried, has given us in The Storm of War a work that despite its length (more than 700 pages) bids fair to become the best one-volume history of World War II in print. His argument, in a nutshell, is that but for Hitler’s military and political misjudgments, which made a European war into a global conflict, the Germans might well have won. Like Snyder, Roberts will make you re-examine long-settled assumptions. But be forewarned: once you pick up the book, you’ll be hooked for the duration.’
Prof Michael M. Uhlmann, Claremont Review of Books

‘Mr. Roberts’ book elegantly balances fact, thought and fresh, clear prose—elements not easily combined in a subject of this magnitude. Mr. Roberts makes a compelling case that the Nazis lost, in large part, because the repressive ideology they espoused left no room for dissent, realism, voluntary cooperation or creativity at the top. Totalitarianism’s phobic bodyguard—conformity—strangled the strategic and political clarity that the war demanded from its leaders. Mr. Roberts has set a high bar for future historians of mankind’s greatest bloodbath. In The Storm of War, Andrew Roberts splendidly weaves a human tragedy into a story of war’s remorseless statistics.’
Jonathan W. Jordan, The Wall Street Journal

‘The broad sweep of Mr Roberts’s narrative, which never flags, marches the reader from battle to battle, theater to theater of this colossal contest, but it does much more than merely chronicle events. Besides vividly evoking the storm of war, Mr Roberts offers his readers that rarest of the historians’s gifts, the ability to synthesize. Mr Roberts is a model of intelligent objectivity when it comes to weighing the various national contributions to Allied victory. Thanks to Mr Roberts’s mastery of substance, style, and, yes, statistics, readers can now enjoy a comprehensive, one-volume history of the war that is far superior to most of the works preceding it.’
Aram Bakshian, The American Spectator

‘With his new book on the Second World War, British historian Andrew Roberts has not only written the single best history of that conflict, but also claimed his place as one of our top historians. If you don’t know as much about World War Two as you think you ought to, or if you want a good, clear picture of how and why it took place as it did, or if you would simply like to cut through the thicket of multi-volume histories, biographies, memoirs, diaries and letters and get the whole story in one book, this is it. I would have said it couldn’t be done, to do the whole of World War Two in 600 pages and get it right, not at any rate without leaving out great chunks, but Roberts has managed to do it, and do it superbly well. The idea that somebody has been able to approach objectively, in the round, as it were, and tell the whole story is amazing, and gives one, for a change, a hopeful feeling about the writing of history.’
Michael Korda, The Daily Beast

‘Andrew Roberts’s narrative gifts are such that it is almost impossible to read his retelling of these nightmares without some feeling of encountering the new. No history book can ever truly be definitive, but this comes close. Roberts never lets his admiration for the martial get in the way of his grip on the moral. Roberts is an author who never loses sight of the human side of this epic.’
Andrew Stuttaford, The National Review

‘Andrew Roberts, author of “Masters and Commanders” and “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900,” has produced what Gen. George Patton might call “a helluva book” – the first totally readable one-volume history of World War II, a literary and historical blitzkrieg, propelled by strong, positive prose, written with concision yet a wealth of detail, and supplied with an arsenal of sources.’
John R. Coyne Jr, The Washington Times

‘Andrew Roberts has a brilliant history of World War II. I recommend it. I have in my library dozens of World War II histories from the very earliest by Liddell Hart. Now all have been rendered curiosities or unfinished works by Roberts’s stupendous history of the war in the theaters of Asia, Africa, and Europe. He writes beautifully and brings the statesmen, generals and admirals, and ordinary soldier and sailors alive on the page.’
Robert E. Tyrrell, The American Spectator

‘Roberts has produced a lucid narrative stream that makes his book flow like a novel. I couldn’t put it down.’
Wiley Hilburn, Shreveport Times

‘This is history as it should be written. Award-winning historian Roberts, a master storyteller, combines a comprehensive command of sources, a sophisticated analytical dimension, and fingertip balance between great events and their personal dimensions.’
Publishers Weekly

‘A comprehensive, insightful one-volume study of World War II that relentlessly pursues the question: Why didn’t the Axis win? An energetic, elegant synthesis of enormous research—with lots of maps!—that will prove a valuable resource for students of European history.’
Kirkus Reviews

‘Roberts gives readers a new, well-written retelling of the spectacular ebb and flow of World War II. A well-sourced and well-told introduction for general readers that will also be enjoyed by those in the know.’
Library Journal Advanced Reviews

‘Roberts’ recounting of WWII reflects a seasoned historian’s astute grasp of campaigns and leaders in Europe and the Pacific, of armaments, and of the war’s numbing toll of 50 million dead, which he humanizes in vignettes of soldiers and civilians. Arguing fluidly and forcefully, Roberts knowledgeably interprets the global conflict for a general audience.’
Booklist

‘Many World War II books require numerous volumes and thousands of pages. But by marching across huge spans of time and territory with the eye of a determined battlefield soldier, British historian Roberts packs the whole war into one 768-page volume. He zeroes in smaller stories which made up the conflict: A British official, for example, almost lost the battle for Kohima, India’s gateway, because he insisted on following peacetime rules restricting use of barbed wire. Roberts also concludes that Hitler was not a great military strategist.’
The New York Post

‘This is a historical account that is accessible, meticulously researched, and executed with clarity.’
Larry Cox, Tucson Citizen