It was a struggle to get to the end of this book, but on the whole a worthwhile struggle. The book was well-written with a plenitude of entertaining anecdotes. However, there were a number of down points. It is over a thousand large, densely written pages and a very large proportion of them describe in horrific detail the atrocities of the second world war, and many of the others dreadful things from the rest of the century. I understand why the author did this, the sheer weight of the volume of the descriptions drives the point home, and it is good not to let war criminals like "Bomber Harris" off the hook, but nevertheless at a certain moment it is too much. It is also not balanced. Reading this book I get the idea that European history is nothing but misery and one dreadful war crime after another. I just wish that a few more of those thousand plus pages had been about some of the good things that have happened in Europe.