title: To Lose a Battle: France 1940
author: Sir Alistair Horne
description: In 1940, the German army fought and won an extraordinary battle with France in six weeks of lightning warfare. With the subtlety and compulsion of a novel, Hornes narrative shifts from minor battlefield incidents to high military and political decisions, stepping far beyond the confines of military history to form a major contribution to our understanding of the crises of the Franco-German rivalry.To Lose a Battle is the third part of the trilogy beginning with The Fall of Paris and continuing with The Price of Glory (already available in Penguin).
zlib_text:  
  ALISTAIR HORNE was educated in Switzerland, at Millbrook School,
  New York, and at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he played international
  ice hockey. In World War II, initially a volunteer in the RAF, he served with
  the Coldstream Guards between 1944 and 1947, ending as a captain
  attached to MI5 in the Middle East. In the 1950s he was a foreign
  correspondent for the Daily Telegraph until taking up a fulltime writing
  career in 1955.
  Horne's trilogy of Franco-German conflict comprises The Fall of Paris:
  The Siege and the Commune, 1870–71, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916,
  and To Lose a Battle: France 1940. In 1963, The Price of Glory was
  awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize; when first published in 1977,
  A Savage War of Peace won both the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize
  and the Wolfson Literary Award. Other books include The Lonely Leader, a
  biography of Field Marshal Montgomery; Small Earthquake in Chile; and,
  most recently, Seven Ages of Paris, La Belle France: A Short Hist