Fast-paced, dramatic ... a great story. Both an enriching history and a rollicking good read

Fascinating ... A fine example of intelligent popular history. In concentrating on the clash between JFK and Krushchev, he does not crudely personalise the conflict. Rather he uses the differing ... situations of these two extraordinary men to strip away appearances and reveal the power realities

Kempe ... has taken on a monumental task and succeeded. The story-telling is masterful, both entertaining and elucidating. The story itself is one to provoke grievance and fury across generations

[A] mind-shaking work of investigative history

History at its best. Kempe's book masterfully dissects the Cold War's strategically most significant East-West confrontation, and in the process significantly enlightens our understanding of the complexity of the Cold War itself

The genius at the heart of this gripping work resembles that of a play by Schiller or Shakespeare

Well researched and lucidly written. What interests [Kempe] is not really Berlin but Washington and Moscow; we learn ... a great deal about the machinations of the two superpowers

Berlin 1961 is a page-turner, written with all the vigour and verve of a spy novel, so you will have difficulty in putting it down until you have finished its 500 pages of gripping narrative

A gripping, well-researched, and thought-provoking book with many lessons for today

Kempe has masterfully captured the dramatic dimensions of a great story that shaped the world order for twenty-eight years. Berlin 1961 is an important achievement

An amazing drama ... Kempe's compelling narrative is a triumph of great writing and research

Engaging, richly researched, thought-provoking ... combines the 'You are there' storytelling skills of a journalist, the analytical skills of the political scientist, and the historian's use of declassified U.S., Soviet, and German documents to provide unique insight into the forces and individuals behind these events

Kempe's compelling narrative, astute analysis, and meticulous research bring fresh insight into a crucial and perilous episode of the Cold War, bringing Kennedy and Khrushchev to life as they square off at the brink of nuclear war. His masterly telling of a scary and cautionary tale from half a century ago has the immediacy of today's headlines

Takes us to Ground Zero of the Cold War. Reading these pages, you feel as if you are standing at Checkpoint Charlie, amid the brutal tension of a divided Berlin

European history comes in many guises, but Brendan Simms's strategic and geopolitical approach provides a strong and lucid framework within which everything else fits into place. His emphasis on the centrality of Germany offsets more western-orientated accounts while also giving due prominence to Eastern Europe. Covering the whole of the modern period, this book is more than an excellent introduction; it's a major interpretational achievement

World history is German history, and German history is world history. This is the powerful case made by this gifted historian of Europe, whose expansive erudition revives the proud tradition of the history of geopolitics, and whose immanent moral sensibility reminds us that human choices made in Berlin (and London) today about the future of Europe might be decisive for the future of the world

A tremendous feat ... Simms's pages teem with some of the greatest characters in European history

Remarkably, such a large and complex book ... offers a very straightforward argument and thesis ... The more familiar the story, the more arresting is Simms's repositioning of it ... This isn't simply academic history but an account of how we came to be, albeit ambivalently and conflictedly, involved in a continental narrative that is still unfolding