Historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett (1902–1975) was one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary political observers. Through an ability to make important connections, he became an authority on Germany in the interwar years and was acquainted with all the German hierarchy, including Hitler and Hindenburg. He was one of the last people to interview Trotsky, writing an important analysis of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1917. As King George VI’s official biographer, he met and interviewed the major leaders of the postwar period, including Churchill, Coolidge, Truman, and members of the British Royal Family. A teacher at the universities of New York, Virginia, and Arizona, he also briefly supervised young Jack Kennedy’s master’s thesis at Harvard. This first biography of Wheeler-Bennett will fascinate anyone interested in the great political figures of world history during the twentieth century.

This is an enquiry into the place of the right of conquest in international relations since the early sixteenth century, and the causes and consequences of its demise in the twentieth century. It was a recognized principle of international law until the early years of this century that a state that emerges victorious in a war is entitled to claim sovereignty over territory which it has taken possession. Sharon Korman shows how the First World War - which led to the rise of self-determination and to calls for the prohibition of way - prompted the reconstruction of international law and the consequent abolition of the title by conquest. Her conclusion, which highlights the merits and defects of the modern law as a vehicle for discouraging war by denying the title to the conqueror, challenges many of the assumptions that have come to constitute part of the conventional wisdom of our times. This is a study, not of international law narrowly conceived, but of the place of a changing legal principle in international history and the contemporary world.