In making the point that history is never totally objective, it is commonplace to observe that it is usually written by “the winners”; this book reads like a history written by one its losers. The author documents what has happened to the world after – and as a result of - the second world war, and he is disappointed with everything. In each of the spheres that his very comprehensive account covers – political and social philosophies, economics and law, international geopolitical developments – nothing has worked out as, in the eyes of the author, it was intended or hoped for.

In his opening chapters, Lowe explains how the war gave rise to a number of “myths” about heroes, martyrs and monsters. The perpetuation of these so-called myths after the war is, in the author’s view, one of the main reasons why things have gone wrong since. The myth of the “greatest generation” of heroes, the men who returned home having defeated the Nazi and Japanese monsters, led to an American triumphalism which forced it to look for new enemies at the end of the war in order to provide a unifying cause to distract from domestic differences. This, in turn, led to the demonization of communism at home (The “Red Scare”, McCarthyism) and abroad (the USSR). In place of the cooperation that characterized their relationships during the war, the myth of “evil” defeated the “the impetus to unite”, and led the USA and the USSR to demonize each other.

The author’s view of post-war history as having been steered by misleading myths, leads him to avoid calling things - or maybe even seeing things for - what they are. Not all Nazis were evil; there were “infinite gradations of guilt and innocence in the Holocaust”. He makes a specious philosophical distinction between being an evil person and committing evil acts. The Japanese doctor, whose wartime job involved dissecting living people and who suffered post-war remorse about this, should not – in Lowe’s view - be defined as monster and war-criminal; he should be judged by the circumstances of the the time and his subsequent mental realignment. His evil acts were just the consequence of the superiors who directed him to do it and the regime that created an environment in which this inhumanity was permissible. How many more times do we have to hear the excuse that people were “just following orders”?

Another result of his reluctance to call a spade a spade is the way that he insists on the essential equivalence between the USA and the Soviet Union. The latter was not a monster like Nazi Germany, and the use of the description “totalitarian” to describe the two regimes, conflates two “different ideologies”. Thus Stalin’s “terror” regime - the repression and murder of minorities, ethnic groups, the intelligentsia, Jews, etc, etc. - was just a more extreme and less opposed version of American domestic repression of communists. The subjugation of eastern Europe by the Soviets was not primarily about the spread of communism, but about protecting the motherland from future attack; it was just a reaction to America’s power at the end of the war, and its possession of nuclear weapons. Andrey Sakharov, the father of the Soviet Hydrogen bomb and later dissident, is one of the author’s poster children; but his later life, in which he served 8 years of internal exile, and during which time his sick wife was refused medical treatment, is referred to only as the Soviet authorities’ “irritation” at his dissidence.

The author’s biggest disappointment is how the post-war world has been driven by nationalism, a force which led to global conflict in the first place and which – as a consequence – might have been seen for the evil that he believes it to be. He documents the ragged course of post-war independence of new, often post-colonial, nations in Asia and Africa and identifies the twin evils that plagued them – a failure to see beyond a parochial nationalism and the Cold War, which was the root cause of much outside interference in these countries. The fact that all of the Latin American countries had emerged as separate nations already a century and a half earlier, hardly supports the author’s thesis about the disruptive influence of post-war nationalism in that part of the world; non the less he forces it into his analysis.

Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel is of course one of the prime manifestations of the follies of nationalism. Israel with its “network of self-serving myths” embodies everything that the author most deplores about the post-war world. In a chapter entitled “Israel; Nation of Archetypes” he describes all the myths that make up Israel – a nation of heroes and victims, a nation that created the “Arab other”; Israel has turned every threat into a new Holocaust and every enemy, the Arabs in particular, into new Nazi “monsters”. In spite of his explicit recognition of the enduring and disproportionate nature of the world’s bias against the Jewish State, he is unable to see its establishment as the only means of protecting Jews from the world’s prejudices; in Lowe’s view, Israel is a botched attempt to “abolish prejudice”. The way to do that, he says, is for the Jews to forget their history – strange advice from a historian - then they could just be ordinary!

In his final chapters, he brings us right up to date with all the deplorable things - the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, the emergence of right wing anti-immigration parties - that have happened in the last few years. The final flourish of his “myth” trope - that anti-Muslim sentiment is just a new resurgence of the fear of Nazism – unfortunately takes him into a world wholly of his own invention: “Muslims now occupy the same place in the European imagination that Jews did at the beginning of the 20th century: the actions of a tiny minority opened the door to the demonization of an entire religion.” I must have missed reading the chapter in which some Jews waged a campaign of world-wide terrorism!

There is much to admire in this book. It is a very informed survey of global history since 1945; it is very readable, and the use of a cameo description of a real person’s life story to introduce the theme of each chapter or section, provides a nice variation in pace. However, the author’s fixation on myths, and his hatred of nationalism, mean that everything has to be force-fitted – even when it contradicts the facts – into a rather warped view of the world. ( )