Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature 2008

12:15, 22 Jul 2008
RUSI, Whitehall, London, SW1A 2ET

Link to map: multimap

About the event:

The winner of the 2008 Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature is Professor Chris Bellamy, for his work “Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War”, published by Pan Macmillan. RUSI would like to invite members to a reception and presentation in honour of Professor Bellamy.

The Duke of Westminster will present the Medal, and the award will be followed by a lecture from Professor Bellamy.    

There have been many individual accounts of particular moments in the vicious war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but none which sets out to tell the full and dreadful story of that war: absolute because both sides aimed to exterminate the opponent, to destroy his political existence and total because it was fought by all elements of society, not simply the armed forces. The work benefits from Professor Bellamy’s remarkable insight into strategic issues as well as exhaustive research in hitherto unused Russian archives. It is the definitive study of what the Soviets called - and what their fifteen successor states still call - the Great Patriotic War.

 The Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature has been awarded annually since 1997. The award is bestowed annually for the best book in the English language by a living author, regardless of nationality, gender or age, which represents in the opinion of the Awarding Board a notable and original contribution to the study of international or national security, or the military professions. Previous winners of the medal include: Hew Strachan, N.A.M. Rodger, John Keegan, Marrack Goulding, Percy Cradock and Professor Rodger Knight.

For further information regarding this year's award, please click here.

If you would like to attend this event please email Rachel Bowden, Events Manager at rachelb@rusi.org.

For all other enquiries, please contact John Hemmings at johnh@rusi.org or call +44 (0)20 7747 2637.

Event manager: Rachel Bowden, +44(0)20 7747 2648