Among the classics of historiography of its time is a book by the great representative of the Annales school, Marc Bloch, with the remarkable title Strange defeat: a statement of evidence written in 1940. Here, Bloch argued that the reason for the rapid collapse of the French in the spring of 1940 against the German troops lay in the political, ideological, educational, and social weakness of the late Third Republic, as much as in the military incompetence of the High Command. Whether this interpretation is still valid today is another matter, but what concerns David Reynolds in his new and highly stimulating collection of eighteen essays is the question of the enormous importance of the year 1940 as such. Reynolds, professor of international history at the University of Cambridge, has put together a remarkable volume of studies, most of which have been published previously elsewhere, often in a slightly different version, and have now been updated in terms of current research. They are clearly linked together, thanks to short summaries of the main arguments at the end of each essay. Moreover, they gain even more significance when brought into the context of the major questions on which Reynolds is focusing: a better understanding of the 1940s, and a critical revision of the so-called ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America.

According to Reynolds, this relationship was largely the result of British initiatives in order to keep, or rather regain, their former global power. Because Britain was able, the argument runs, to influence the United States in this matter and thereby shape Anglo-American Cold War policies, the relationship was ‘special’ to a certain extent, as it strengthened a particular cultural link that Reynolds terms ‘the historic tradition of Anglo-American liberalism’ (p. 330). This idea sets Britain apart from its continental partners and confirms its Atlantic (as opposed to its European) connection. Moral conviction, political calculation, and diplomatic pragmatism were all forces that were instrumental in colonial expansion in Britain's past, as they are instrumental in America's imperialism in the present.

The six parts are arranged with the titles ‘World War’, ‘Churchill’, ‘Roosevelt’, ‘ “Mixed up together” ’, ‘Cold War’, and ‘Perspectives’. It is Reynolds’ particular interest to investigate these historical questions in the light of international history, thereby combining openness to new historiographical tendencies with reliance on older narratives of military strategies and political alliances. In order to underline the immense importance of the year 1940, it is essential to see it in its international context and meaning. Of particular importance was Hitler's ‘Blitzsieg’ over France, the ‘strange defeat’, according to Marc Bloch, without which Britain and the US would not have become allies so quickly, Italy would not have been encouraged to go to war, Germany would not have invaded Russia, and Japan would not have attacked the US fleet in Pearl Harbour. In Reynolds’ words, ‘the fall of France … revolutionized the perceptions and aspirations of most other powers’ (p. 44). Likewise, the great post-1945 phenomena in world history – Cold War, decolonization, and the economic and political integration of Western Europe – would have been shaped differently without the crucial decade of the 1940s, when the world was turned upside down. So far, Reynolds’ challenging thesis.

In the spring of 1946, Churchill delivered his famous ‘Sinews of peace’ speech in Fulton, Missouri, with the metallic metaphor of the ‘Iron Curtain’: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’. The geopolitical and physical meaning of the boundary was enriched by its cultural and ideological connotations. As a consequence of the wartime antagonism, Britain and the United States moved closer together, as was Churchill's calculation. Yet, as Reynolds argues, Churchill was for a long time not convinced that Britain would win the war, and so he retained some optimistic beliefs in cooperating with Stalin: an important aspect, which most historians have underestimated. But the normalization of the relations between the Eastern and Western blocks was already made an illusion when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta in 1945, a summit that Reynolds has described in one of his other recently published books, Summits: six meetings that shaped the twentieth century (London: Allen Lane, 2007), as one of the great diplomatic failures of twentieth-century international history.

At the heart of Churchill's political thinking was the relationship between Britain and the United States. Here, elementary questions were asked that became of great importance to the development of international politics, and there were also social and cultural implications for British everyday life. Thus neither war nor Cold War was inevitable, but they followed the decisions and actions affecting an ever faster-changing world. The decolonization process in Africa and Southeast Asia, the emergence of the Middle East as a geopolitical volcano, and the partitions of Vietnam and Korea were global configurations, to which Reynolds unfortunately pays less attention than they deserve in a book about World War and Cold War, for they crucially formed international history from the 1940s onwards. Although Roosevelt had a Eurocentric perspective when conceptualizing world politics, international history would profit from a more global conceptualization of the decade under review.

For students of international history, this book opens a treasure chest for the understanding of the dynamics of diplomacy, the creation of alliances, and the problem of Britain and her empire losing world power status and increasingly being overruled by the new superpowers. Students of international history are encouraged by Reynolds’ compellingly written studies to consider that, whatever the importance of historical categories such as culture, otherness, and gender, it remains indispensable for the historian of the twentieth century to look behind the scenes of the diplomats’ world. Reynolds emphasizes a multilayered conception of the state, which gives equal attention to long-term diplomatic relations and to short-term cultural exchange programmes. If this story is not being told from the top level, from the vantage point of the great powers only, but also has regard for the familiar, such as Roosevelt as ‘the wheelchair president’, it reveals one of the most decisive decades of the more recent past, without which it would be unthinkable to conceive the present.