Fin De Siecle: The Meaning of the Twentieth Century

by Alex Danchev (Editor)

Bringing together specialists from the fields of international relations, history and politics, this work attempts to answer three main questions regarding the 20th century. It considers what the century's salient characteristics have been, what else is ending as the century ends, and whether Churchill was right in calling it a "disappointing century".

As the contributors address these issues, they also discuss whether it has been an American century or a "nuclear" century, and whether it marks the "end of history", the triumph of Western liberalism, or merely the end of the Cold War.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 1995

About the author

Alex Danchev was Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham, and a long-standing friend of the Tate in London, where he has been a member of the Acquisition Committee of the Patrons of New Art.

His interests wandered across the borders of art, politics, and military history although his focus is chiefly biographical.

His biography of the philosopher-statesman Oliver Franks (Oxford University Press, 1993) was on the Observer's 'Books of the Year' and his biography of the military writer Basil Liddell Hart (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998) was listed for the Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.

His unexpurgated edition of the Alanbrooke Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001) was listed for the W.H. Smith Prize for Biography. In 2009 he published On Art and War and Terror, a collection of essays on the most difficult issues of our age and, in particular, the nature of humanity in times of conflict.