A TimesSunday Times Book of the YearPowerful . . . there is rage in his ink. McKays book grips by its passion and originality. Some 25000 people perished in the firestorm that raged through the city. I have never seen it better described Max Hastings Sunday TimesIn February 1945 the Allies obliterated Dresden the Florence of the Elbe. Explosive bombs weighing over 1000 lbs fell every seven and a half seconds and an estimated 25000 people were killed. Was Dresden a legitimate military target or was the bombing a last act of atavistic mass murder in a war already wonFrom the history of the city to the attack itself conveyed in a minutebyminute account from the first of the flares to the flames reaching almost a mile high the wind so searingly hot that the lungs of those in its path were instantly scorched through the eerie period of reconstruction bestselling author Sinclair McKay creates a vast canvas and brings it alive with touching human detail.Along the way we encounter among many others across the city a Jewish woman who thought the English bombs had been sent from heaven novelist Kurt Vonnegut who wrote that the smouldering landscape was like walking on the surface of the moon and 15yearold Winfried Bielss who having spent the evening ushering refugees wanted to get home to his stamp collection. He was not to know that there was not enough time.Impeccably researched and deeply moving McKay uses neverbeforeseen sources to relate the untold stories of civilians and vividly conveys the texture of contemporary life. Dresden is invoked as a byword for the illimitable cruelties of war but with the distance of time it is now possible to approach this subject with a much clearer gaze and with a keener interest in the sorts of lives that ordinary people lived and lost or tried to rebuild.Writing with warmth and colour about morality in war the instinct for survival the gravity of mass destruction and the manipulation of memory this is a master historian at work.Church