Ian Kershaw's Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-41 offers a penetrating insight into a series of momentous political decisions that shaped the course of the Second World War.

The hurricane of events that marked the opening of the Second World War meant that anything could happen. For the aggressors there was no limit to their ambitions; for their victims a new Dark Age beckoned. Over the next few months their fates would be determined.

In Fateful Choices Ian Kershaw re-creates the 10 critical decisions taken between May 1940, when Britain chose not to surrender, and December 1941, when Hitler decided to destroy Europe's Jews, showing how these choices would recast the entire course of history.

Ian Kershaw (b. 1943) was Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield from 1989 to 2008 and is one of the world's leading authorities on Hitler. His books include The "Hitler Myth"; his two-volume biography Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis; and Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941. He was knighted in 2002.