Seventy years ago the most devastating war the world has ever seen ended: World War II.

This is the first book to tell their story.

From Churchill and Roosevelt to Stalin and Truman; this era produced some of the most remarkable statesmen of modern times. The legacies of figures such as George Marshall and John Maynard Keynes towered over the post-war world for decades. It is their stories that form the core fabric of this book. Facing a world in ruins in 1945 with the collapse of old empires and the political world map redrawn, they came together to make peace. The United Nations, NATO and other international institutions that they built continue to shape our world today.

With a wealth of detail and entertaining anecdotes on these and less well known figures, Richard Crowder examines their bold ambition to rebuild the world, and launch a second age of globalization.