In the News: Alan Allport

“The book is a story about what happened to the common citizen, and the common soldier. It is a splendid example of how to do a fully rounded work on a people at total war, of how to use a vast mix of sources, and to keep the story going,” writes reviewer Paul Kennedy, Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University.

“Allport is a fluid writer, a conjurer with the rare ability to sustain a gripping narrative without resorting to Vaseline-lensed sentimentality. He overturns one piece of conventional wisdom after another—quarrelsome, occasionally, to a fault,” says New York Times reviewer Kevin Peraino.

“Contrary to a lot of modern assumptions, it [the Maginot Line] was never expected to defeat a German attack by itself. The point of the Maginot Line was not to stop the boche in their tracks, but to channel any future westward offensive away from the French industrial heartland and toward the Low Countries, particularly Belgium,” writes Alan Allport, professor of history.

Alan Allport, professor of history, has written Advance Britannia: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945 (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026). The book is a sequel to Allport’s 2020 work Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941 (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020).

“There is no silly sensationalism in this book, merely sound storytelling and measured judgments. The author writes of ‘that particular German approach to war-making in the first half of the 20th century—tactical ingenuity in the service of strategic vacuity,’ writes Max Hastings, book critic for The Sunday Times.

“The Roosevelt administration had attempted to reign in the Japanese, particularly by the use of economic boycotts. In mid-1941, especially, the Roosevelt administration had boycotted all sales of gasoline and aviation fuel to the Japanese. Now the idea was that this would be a detterent to the Japanese. It would persuade them to withdraw from China. But ironically, it ended up having the opposite effect,” says Alan Allport, professor of history.

The world is now reaching the point “where it’s kind of the twilight of lived experience, where from this point onwards, D-Day is going to be just a historical event that nobody who participates in commemorations had any personal memory of,” says Alan Allport, Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History.

Alan Allport, Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History, further explains the significance of D-Day and its impact generations later. 

"He [Prince Harry] will be, I imagine, under a lot of pressure from the palace to try to tone things down. But on the other hand, he is pretty alienated from a lot of these folks and he may feel that since he's not actually a working royal anymore that he's entitled to say whatever he wishes," says Alan Allport, Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History.

"The royal family always tries to tread this difficult line between appearing to maintain a kind of continuity with the past but also not seeming to be completely out of date and irrelevant either," says Alan Allport, Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History.

"Harry seems to, for good reasons or bad, rightly or wrongly, he seems to have an enormous amount of grievances and he’s not being shy about saying them," says Alan Allport, professor of history.

"I think it seems to have been pretty successful," says Alan Allport, Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History. "Charles has had an awful lot of time to prepare for this role."

British Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned on Thursday after a tumultuous 45 days in office. Alan Allport, professor of history, calls the resignation "extraordinary" and explains what it means for British politics in an interview with NewsNation.

Alan Allport, Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History, was interviewed for the HISTORY article, "Queen Elizabeth’s First Televised Broadcast Presented a New Type of Monarch."

Alan Allport, professor of history, provided commentary during NewsNation's livestream of Queen Elizabeth's funeral on Monday, September 19.

Alan Allport, professor of history, has been named the Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History at the Maxwell School.