Bernard Wasserstein was born in London in 1948 and educated in Glasgow and Leicester. He studied Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford.

His academic positions include: Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, 1995. President, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, 1996-2000. Professor of Modern History, University of Glasgow 2000-3. Fellow, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, 2002-3. Ulrich and Harriet Meyer Professor of Modern European Jewish History, University of Chicago 2003- . Visiting Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2004-5.

Publications: The British in Palestine (1978), Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 (1979), The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (1988: Golden Dagger Award for Non-Fiction), Herbert Samuel (1992), Vanishing Diaspora (1996), Secret War in Shanghai (1998),Divided Jerusalem (2001), Israel and Palestine (2003). Ed. The Letters of Chaim Weizmann, vols. X and XI (1977), The Jews in Modern France (with Frances Malino, 1985), The Major International Treaties since 1945 (with J.A.S. Grenville, 1987, new ed. The Major International Treaties of the Twentieth Century, 2000).

The twentieth century in Europe witnessed some of the most brutish episodes in history. Yet it also saw incontestable improvements in the conditions of existence for most inhabitants of the continent - from rising living standards and dramatically increased life expectancy, to the virtual elimination of illiteracy, and the advance of women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals to greater equality of respect and opportunity.

It was a century of barbarism and civilization, of cruelty and tenderness, of technological achievement and environmental spoliation, of imperial expansion and withdrawal, of authoritarian repression - and of individualism resurgent.

Covering everything from war and politics to social, cultural, and economic change, BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION is by turns grim, humorous, surprising, and enlightening: a window on the century we have left behind and the earliest years of its troubled successor.