examines the road to the Second World War, but the real focus is on life inside the Third Reich. Evans allows small stories of key individuals to illustrate many of the key social, economic and cultural events of the period. Richard Overy described this instalment of the trilogy as "magisterial." The third volume, The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster (published by Penguin in 2008), looks at major developments from 1939 to 1945, including the key battles of the Second World War, a vivid, moving and detailed account of the mass murder enacted during the Holocaust and Hitler's dramatic downfall in Berlin in 1945. In an October 2008 review of the third volume for The Times, best-selling historian Antony Beevor writes: "With this third volume, Richard Evans has accomplished a masterpiece of historical scholarship ... [He] has produced the best and most up-to-date synthesis of the huge work carried out on the subject over the past decades." Aspects of it, however, were sharply criticised by Timothy Snyder. Walter Reich, former Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D. C., states about the third-volume of the trilogy, The Third Reich at War, "If any work of accurate history has a chance to correct the distortions of public memory, this is it." The Third Reich trilogy has been, or is being translated into sixteen foreign languages. Recent publications and current work In 2013, Evans delivered the Menachem Stern Jerusalem Lectures to the Historical Society of Israel, publishing them in 2014 as "Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History". The book puts forward a variety of arguments against the use of long-range alternative historical timelines as an aid to serious historical understanding. In "Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent" (2009, an expanded version of his Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor), he explored the reasons why so many British historians have made such major contributions to the historical understanding of other European countries. "The Third Reich in History and Memory" (2015) is a collection of 28 articles and review essays on modern German history published since the turn of the century. In 2016, Evans published The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 in the Penguin History of Europe. It has been widely reviewed. Gerard De Groot, writing in The Times, commented that the book "chronicles a turbulent and confusing century with wonderful clarity