William Woodruff Knihy

The second volume of Woodruff's memoirs starts with him having arrived in Poplar in the early 1930s. On spec he turns up at a steel foundry and luckily gets a job. His digs are with an old couple in Bow where he has to share a single bed (head to toe) with their mentally retarded son. Life in the foundry is grim but William is indomitable. For recreation one day he cycles (then in the days before inflatable tyres) to Berkhamstead to try and track down an old girlfriend. She's not there and he has to return in a snowstorm - it takes him eight hours to get back to Poplar and then he has to get up three hours later to work at the foundry. Eventually he decides to 'get some leernin' and his first white collar job starts for the water board in ... Brettenham House! He continues to pursue his studies, finally winning a place at Ruskin College, Oxford. How the ex-steel worker became an Oxford academic - and William's concluding description of returning from the war to meet the son he's never seen - is deeply moving.

A terrifying true-life novel about the 1944 Anzio landings in the tradition of BAND OF BROTHERS.

A marvelously evocative account of growing up poor in a British mill town.

Woodruff's novel is about the fortunes of an Oxford University rowing eight, leading up to and during the Second World War. Ultimately this book, like the Nab End stories, is about common humanity and the importance of virtues such as faith, loyalty, and self- sacrifice.

William Woodruff's magisterial history has a particular resonance in today's world; for it is a history of the last five hundred years, of the ascendancy of the West over the older empires of the East. The rise and expansion of the West began with the messianic zeal of Christianity asserting itself over the Muslim world, something that, half a millennium later, is being revisited through the use and abuse of the crucial element of statecraft - power. For as much as this is a study of history, it is also a portrayal of that power and how it shaped our contemporary world. We cannot hope to understand the present, contends Woodruff, without knowing the past. And, with broad and boldly illuminating brushstrokes, he paints a vivid picture of the past half-millennium and the scope, significance and speed of the changes the West has effected. After five centuries, contends Woodruff, the pendulum is swinging back towards the East. The baton once wielded by the European imperialists in their frenzied drive to 'save the world' has been seized by America and is pointing east towards Islam, the world's fastest-growing religion, and to Asia, the new powerhouse of great nation states. Learned and lucid, A Concise History of the Modern World is also pertinent and provocative. Rather than an excavation of the past, it is an assessment of our history as both companion to the present and architect of the future.