Lang Thompson mentions looking forward to reading, among other things, Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad. It is a truly amazing and appalling book. It is a mixture of the historians eye for detail with the grand sweep of an epic film and a novelists sense of pace and story telling. Be warned some of the scenes will stay with you to the grave. You really do peep into the outer regions of hell. His new book on the fall of Berlin is, if anything, even more memorable. There is a slightly dubious suggestion as to the Russians determination to reach Berlin but the depiction of the sheer nightmare chaos and the unbelievable scale of killing are stunning. His uncovering of mass rape as a weapon is almost unreadable. I have no real interest in military history and these are the first books I have read in the genre but I would not hesitate to recommend them to anyone. Richard Gardner