Five Days in London
“A gripping historical drama.… Lukacs’s story is not new, … but [he] has transformed it into a memorable drama.” — M. F. Perutz, New York Review of Books
“[A] fascinating work of historical reconstruction.… [Lukacs] gives us much to ponder in this intriguing—and perhaps still controversial—story.”—Stanley Weintraub, Wall Street Journal
“Between May 24 and May 28 (1940), history itself was in the balance, and Lukacs reconstructs these days with the immediacy and detail of a thripller, using a wide range of government and private papers.” — David Pryce-Jones, National Review
“Lukacs’s scholarship re-creates with great immediacy the chaotic few days during which, according to the author, Hitler came closest to winning the war.”—New Yorker
“Lukacs has a storyteller’s gift and writes beautifully on a subject that might by lesser historians be taken for granted. Must reading for any World War II scholar or buff.”—Virginia Quarterly Review
“Eminent historian Lukacs delivers the crown jewel to his long and distinguished career with this account of five days—May 24-28, 1940—that could have changed the world.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] riveting book.… Lukacs weaves his account from a rich assembly of sources—excerpts from the diaries of Enoch Powell, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, mystery writer Margery Allingham, all the official records and the opinion surveys that kept showing a stubborn determination of the ordinary British to carry on.”—Sandra Gwyn, Toronto Globe and Mail
“This is a readable and rigorous little volume that is put down with difficulty in the middle and with regret at the end.”—Conrad Black, Daily Telegraph
“Lukacs has constructed a gripping narrative.… This is a must for every World War II buff.”—Jules Wagman, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Those concerned with the long tides of history and with the coils of chance in human destiny will delight in the elegant, searching, and affecting book Lukacs has written about a critical time.”—Lynwood Abram, Houston Chronicle
“[Lukacs] brings to his topic, as to everything else he has treated, a sparkling and original mind.”—Michael Howard, National Interest
“Historian John Lukacs, who has written widely on World War II and on Hitler and Churchill, comprehensively traces the events of that long weekend, which culminated in Churchill’s decision on May 28th to fight on, no matter what happened to France.”—David Murray, New York Times Book Review
“Artfully constructed and elegantly narrated.”—Philadelphia Inquirer
“A skillful weaving together of great power diplomacy, intra-War Cabinet debates, and pulse-takings of British blokes-in-the-street. … A book with many virtues, the most surprising of which may be its timeliness.”—Weekly Standard
“No historian of the Second World War has John Lukacs’s range, acuteness, intuition. He has written great works. Now comes a masterpiece. In Five Days in London we are present, moment by moment, May 24 to May 28, 1940, as the British War Cabinet ponders whether to seek terms from Hitler, or fight on. Alone. ‘Not only the end of a European war but the end of Western civilization was near.’ In the end Churchill prevails—just.”—Daniel Patrick Moynihan