Historians call it the Bauernkrieg or German Peasants’ War, but to people at the time it was simply the Aufruhr (‘the turmoil’). Through the second half of 1524 and into the summer of 1525, rebellion on an unprecedented scale swept across swathes of southern and central Germany. There is no real earlier point of comparison, and Europe would see no equivalent outbreak of popular fury prior to the French Revolution.In the end, the rebels were comprehensively defeated by their masters, the German princes and ecclesiastical lords; as many as a hundred thousand peasants may have been killed in a succession of one-sided battles and the pitiless retribution that followed. And yet, as Lyndal Roper argues in this hugely impressive study – the first comprehensive account of the events to appear in a generation – the uproar of 1524–5 fully deserves the designation ‘revolution’. In one sense, the rebels achieved none of their aims; in another, nothing was ever the same again.A history of the Peasants’ War poses significant challenges. The rebels rose in local and regional bands ... read more

This short but quietly devastating book traces the descent of the United States government and military into barbarism during the final months of the Pacific War. Between March and August 1945, in the ‘rain of ruin’ of the title, US aircraft killed over 300,000 Japanese civilians in a campaign of incendiary bombing and two nuclear strikes, brushing aside the attempts made by the high-minded diplomats who had drawn up the Hague Conventions and the Hague Rules of Air Warfare to outlaw aerial attacks on civilians and civilian property. During the firebombing ... read more