Mighty Continent: View of Europe in the Twentieth Century

London: BBC Books / Hutchinson . Very Good/Very Good. 1974. First Edition. Hard Cover. 4to 25.4 x 20.1 x 3.3 cm 0091222605 Dust jacket complete except price clipped. Original yellow cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. Illustrated with photographs. 352 pages clean and tight. In 1900 Europe dominated the world. After seventy-five years and two world wars the continent may perhaps be rising again. But, as John Terraine points out, it has many adjustments to make. This is the theme of this 'television history', as the author calls it. It is com­plementary to a BBC television series of the same title, but it is not simply 'the book of the film'. Thus it takes its place beside other television histories - Alistair Cooke's America, Mark Arnold-Forster's The World at War, John Terraine's own Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten. In thirteen programmes the television series charts the troubled story of Europe from the days of the Habsburgs until the rise of the EEC. It is a miracle of lucid compression, of vivid narrative and of historical perspective. John Terraine wrote and narrated the series, and Peter Ustinov embellished it with comments. In the book John Terraine develops themes which television must cut short, filling in the gaps, submitting the evi­dence, and giving permanence to one of the most exciting periods in history - seventy-five years which saw two world wars, and many local ones, the ending of the age-old imperial dynasties of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia, and the break-up of the empires of the other great European nations, the rise of socialism and communism, the League of Nations and the United Nations, the EEC, and many other events which he recalls in this personal account. The book is fully illustrated with contemporary photo­graphs and paintings. .