The history of the Second World War, with its horrible twists and turns, is so well known that the major events and their outcomes have taken on a sort of inevitability. Ian Kershaws extraordinarily though-provoking and gripping new book, Fateful Choices, demolishes any such sense of inevitability. It dramatises brilliantly and distressingly events that between them could have resulted in disaster or victory - either for the Allies or for the Axis.