A Conversation With: Author Antony Beevor Since 1998, the British military historian Antony Beevor has written six books on the Second World War -"Crete," "Berlin," "Stalingrad," "D-Day," "Paris" and "The Second World War," - in which he re-creates the military strategies and the on-the-ground military conflict. At the Jaipur Literature Festival over the weekend, Mr. Beevor talked to India Ink about how he wrote his 2012 book, "The Second World War," the treatment of the conflict's gruesome aspects and why the war still interests readers. Before writing "The Second World War," you wrote about specific battles that took place during the war such as "Stalingrad" and "Berlin." Was it a challenge writing about the whole war, rather than specific battles? Having done separate books about the battles, in particular the "D-Day" book, that I hadn't really appreciated the knock-on effect of what's happening on the Russian front, what's happening in Normandy, and so it was terribly important to understand how the whole thing fitted together, how events in the Pacific affected events in Europe and vice versa. To begin with, it started off all very fine, and then I panicked. I really felt I'd taken on more than I could cope with because you can be overwhelmed with the sheer quantity of material. The important thing is you've got to keep your nerve at that particular stage, and eventually it all falls into place and you feel less panicky. What was the stuff that never made it into the book from the volume of material you talk about? Well, the only stuff was, frankly, the pornography of war. It's a very difficult decision to make. When I did the "Berlin" book, the horrors were so unbelievable -- the treatment of German women, in particular, by Soviet troops and so forth. When you've finished a book, you lose all self-critical faculties, so I have Artemis [Cooper Beevor, his wife] go through my manuscripts. Katherine Meredith, who's doing her own book on the war, also went through the manuscript and said, "You must take these bits out, partly because it might be misunderstood." This is the stage where one desperately needs that kind of advice about the book at that stage because you're blind. Wars are dark and catastrophic events. How do you ensure that you write about the darker side of it without the narrative getting hampered? Well, it's part of the narrative because you're basically creating the experience of the people at that time. What you have to be careful about is that there are certain incidents, which are so extreme that they are attention-grabbing but not really representative so you've got to be careful about the balance of your narrative between some things that are necessary and something that's attention-grabbing but not representative. How much of your training as an officer at the Sandhurst Military Academy helped in the writing of your books? Not so much my training at Sandhurst but soldiering afterwards, with the regiment [11th Hussars] in Germany did help. There are one or two very good women military historians who use imagination, great study and research; they can put themselves in the boots of the soldier. The great help of being in the Army is to understand why are the armies clever in what they describe as emotional intelligence, making soldiers come to terms with the death of comrades by certain rituals. The trouble is when outsiders come in - they see the armies as cold, calculating machines. But in fact, they're quite clever in how they prepare soldiers for what lies ahead. Since the Second World War, two generations and many other conflicts have been born. Do you think World War II is fading away from memory? Funnily enough, I did in 1995, when I was in Moscow researching "Stalingrad." It was the 50th anniversary of the Second World War, and in England, all the books on it failed to sell. It was a publishing disaster. I was in the second year of my four-year book, and I thought was working on a subject which was dead. But to everybody's astonishment, it [the book] took off. For a long time, we've been living in a military environment. Europe is still acutely conscious about D-Day. People, I think, are fascinated by a period of time when people had no control of their own fate. They are fascinated by the extreme opposite of their own daily lives and pose questions like "would I have survived psychologically," "would I have survived physically" and "would I have survived morally." So all of these things become intensely personal, and the reason why, in the late "90s, there was a renaissance - was partly because history's been written in rather collective terms. There was an official version of history - a history of an army, or a regiment - and then suddenly people realized there was a history of the individual. And I was lucky in the timing because it wasn't just military history buffs but individual readers. "Stalingrad" and "Berlin" were read by a lot of women. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Follow him on Twitter @aayushsoni.