Keith Lowe – författare

Keith Lowe's Savage Continent is an awe-inspiring portrait of how Europe emerged from the ashes of WWII.The end of the Second World War saw a terrible explosion of violence across Europe. Prisoners murdered jailers. Soldiers visited atrocities on civilians. Resistance fighters killed and pilloried collaborators. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, rape and murder were rife in the days, months and years after hostilities ended. Exploring a Europe consumed by vengeance, Savage Continent is a shocking portrait of an until-now unacknowledged time of lawlessness and terror.Praise for Savage Continent:'Deeply harrowing, distinctly troubling. Moving, measured and provocative. A compelling and plausible picture of a continent physically and morally brutalized by slaughter' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times'Excellent', Independent 'Unbearable but essential. A serious account of things we never knew and our fathers would rather forget. Lowe's transparent prose makes it difficult to look away from a whole catalogue of horrors...you won't sleep afterwards. Such good history it keeps all the questions boiling in your mind', ScotsmanKeith Lowe is widely recognized as an authority on the Second World War, and has often spoken on TV and radio, both in Britain and the United States. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943 (Penguin). He lives in north London with his wife and two children.

A Spectator Book of the Year 2020 A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020 A Mail on Sunday Book of the Year 2020 ‘Inspired … Lowe’s sensitive, disturbing book should be compulsory reading for both statue builders and statue topplers’ MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMESWhat happens when our values change, but what we have set in stone does not?Humankind has always had the urge to memorialise, to make physical testaments to the past. There’s just one problem: when we carve a statue or put up a monument, it can wind up holding us hostage to bad history.In this extraordinary history book, Keith Lowe uses monuments from around the world to show how different countries have attempted to sculpt their history in the wake of the Second World War, and what these memorials reveal about their politics and national identity today.Amongst many questions, the book asks: What does Germany signal to today’s far right by choosing not to disclose the exact resting place of Hitler? How can a bronze statue of a young girl in Seoul cause mass controversy? What is Russia trying to prove and hide, still building victory monuments at a prolific rate for a war now seventy years over?As many around the world are questioning who and what we memorialise, Prisoners of History challenges our idea of national memory, history, and the enormous power of symbols in society today.

A Spectator Book of the Year 2020 A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020 A Mail on Sunday Book of the Year 2020 ‘Inspired … Lowe’s sensitive, disturbing book should be compulsory reading for both statue builders and statue topplers’ MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMESWhat happens when our values change, but what we have set in stone does not?Humankind has always had the urge to memorialise, to make physical testaments to the past. There’s just one problem: when we carve a statue or put up a monument, it can wind up holding us hostage to bad history.In this extraordinary history book, Keith Lowe uses monuments from around the world to show how different countries have attempted to sculpt their history in the wake of the Second World War, and what these memorials reveal about their politics and national identity today.Amongst many questions, the book asks: What does Germany signal to today’s far right by choosing not to disclose the exact resting place of Hitler? How can a bronze statue of a young girl in Seoul cause mass controversy? What is Russia trying to prove and hide, still building victory monuments at a prolific rate for a war now seventy years over?As many around the world are questioning who and what we memorialise, Prisoners of History challenges our idea of national memory, history, and the enormous power of symbols in society today.

An Aspects of History Best Book of the Year; An Engelsberg Ideas Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the HWA Non-fiction Crown Award ‘A rigorous, myth-busting look at the city’s chaotic recovery in the wake of war and fascism’ FINANCIAL TIMES The Second World War destroyed countless cities in Europe and Asia. Naples 1944 is the story of the first major European city to be liberated by the Allies. The book describes not only what happened to Naples when the scourge of war lashed down upon it, but also, crucially, what happened next. This is the first major history of wartime Naples to appear in the English language. It fills a glaring gap in the British and American historiography of the war and shares a hoard of new stories – some of them truly shocking – that have never yet been published in any language.When the Allies arrived in late 1943, Naples had already suffered a brutal German occupation and suffered reprisals from the city’s heroic resistance and uprisings. This did not save it from the merciless Allied bombing. The city was on its knees with widespread suffering and squalor. Criminal gangs prospered, as did typhus, starvation and soaring prices on the black market. Much of the female population was forced into part-time prostitution simply to obtain food. Then Vesuvius erupted.Lowe’s gripping and powerful book places Naples right at the heart of Italian history. What happened in this city was not a mere sideshow to bigger events taking place further north, it was central to the story of the country as a whole. Neapolitans resisted Fascism just as the Florentines, the Bolognese, and the Milanese did. They suffered just as northerners did, and they longed as much for constitutional rebirth. The heroism and sacrifice that took place in Naples were harbingers of what would later happen throughout Italy – as were the compromise and corruption of ideals that came after the Allies took control.Naples 1944 is original and humane history at its very best, and a book which shows that Neapolitan story is the Italian story.

Winner of The 2025 Duke of Wellington Medal Winner for Military History An Aspects of History Best Book of the Year; An Engelsberg Ideas Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the HWA Non-fiction Crown Award ‘A rigorous, myth-busting look at the city’s chaotic recovery in the wake of war and fascism’ FINANCIAL TIMESThis is the first major history of wartime Naples to appear in the English language. It fills a glaring gap in the British and American historiography of the war and shares a hoard of new stories – some of them truly shocking – that have never yet been published in any language.When the Allies arrived in late 1943, Naples had already suffered a brutal German occupation and suffered reprisals from the city’s heroic resistance and uprisings. This did not save it from the merciless Allied bombing. The city was on its knees with widespread suffering and squalor. Criminal gangs prospered, as did typhus, starvation and soaring prices on the black market. Much of the female population was forced into part-time prostitution simply to obtain food. Then Vesuvius erupted.Lowe’s gripping and powerful book places Naples right at the heart of Italian history. What happened in this city was not a mere sideshow to bigger events taking place further north, it was central to the story of the country as a whole. Neapolitans resisted Fascism just as the Florentines, the Bolognese, and the Milanese did. They suffered just as northerners did, and they longed as much for constitutional rebirth. The heroism and sacrifice that took place in Naples were harbingers of what would later happen throughout Italy – as were the compromise and corruption of ideals that came after the Allies took control.Naples 1944 is original and humane history at its very best, and a book which shows that Neapolitan story is the Italian story.

Winner of The 2025 Duke of Wellington Medal Winner for Military History An Aspects of History Best Book of the Year; An Engelsberg Ideas Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the HWA Non-fiction Crown Award ‘A rigorous, myth-busting look at the city’s chaotic recovery in the wake of war and fascism’ FINANCIAL TIMESThis is the first major history of wartime Naples to appear in the English language. It fills a glaring gap in the British and American historiography of the war and shares a hoard of new stories – some of them truly shocking – that have never yet been published in any language.When the Allies arrived in late 1943, Naples had already suffered a brutal German occupation and suffered reprisals from the city’s heroic resistance and uprisings. This did not save it from the merciless Allied bombing. The city was on its knees with widespread suffering and squalor. Criminal gangs prospered, as did typhus, starvation and soaring prices on the black market. Much of the female population was forced into part-time prostitution simply to obtain food. Then Vesuvius erupted.Lowe’s gripping and powerful book places Naples right at the heart of Italian history. What happened in this city was not a mere sideshow to bigger events taking place further north, it was central to the story of the country as a whole. Neapolitans resisted Fascism just as the Florentines, the Bolognese, and the Milanese did. They suffered just as northerners did, and they longed as much for constitutional rebirth. The heroism and sacrifice that took place in Naples were harbingers of what would later happen throughout Italy – as were the compromise and corruption of ideals that came after the Allies took control.Naples 1944 is original and humane history at its very best, and a book which shows that Neapolitan story is the Italian story.

In the last days of July 1943, British and American planes dropped 9,000 tons of bombs with the intention of erasing the German city from the map. The resultant firestorm burned for a month and left 40,000 civilians dead.Inferno is a searing account of terrifying destruction: of how and why the Allies dropped a hail of high-explosive and incendiary bombs; of blizzards of sparks, hurricane-force winds and 800-degree temperatures; of survivors cowering in basements or struggling along melting streets; of a city and its people near annihilated from above.Inferno is an epic story of human devastation and survival against impossible odds.