world politics since 1945 by peter calvocoressi

There he worked in the famous Hut 3, which decrypted messages from Germany’s Enigma machines and passed intelligence, known as Ultra, to the Allies’ military commanders. In 1942, his gift for languages saw him plucked out for duty to Bletchley Park, the wartime home of the Allied codebreakers.

Soon after, through a contact, he was interviewed by the Air Ministry and shortly after became an RAF intelligence officer. After a day of tests at the War Office he was told he was “no good, not even for intelligence”. Soon after the start of the Second World War, Calvocoressi resolved to volunteer to become more active in the war effort. He was called to the Bar in 1935 and shortly thereafter was recruited into the Ministry of Economic Warfare, based at the London School of Economics. Peter was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford where he got a first in modern history. Peter’s parents moved to London in 1910 and he was born two years later. However, in one of his autobiographical works he considered himself “entirely Greek”, being part of the Ralli family who left the Aegean island of Chios in the 19 th century diaspora. He was born in Karachi, in what is now Pakistan, but then was British India, making him a British subject. The Calvocoressi name hints at his most international of upbringings. His academic credentials were equally impressive: he was Reader in International Relations at the University of Sussex, a post created especially for him. It is one of more than 20 books he wrote during his lifetime, which stretched from a Who’s Who in The Bible to Suez: Ten Years After.

The book, which the Sunday Times called “masterly”, has remained in print ever since and stretches to almost 900 pages. In 1968, Calvocoressi published what became the definitive work on post-war global history, World Politics Since 1945. Of the “gang of four” who signed the documents establishing the Writers and Scholars Education Trust fifty years ago on 25 March 1971, Peter Calvocoressi perhaps embodied the spirit of that trust more than the other three.

World politics since 1945 by peter calvocoressi