Armando Iannucci, creator of the darkly comic series Veep and The Thick of It, is surely one of our more perceptive contemporary political observers. While making us laugh or grimace with recognition at the manoeuvrings of his characters, he can also pull us up cold. For example, Iannucci spends most of The Death of Stalin mocking the posturing of the politburo following the tyrant’s death in 1953. Then, suddenly, disturbingly, the merry-go-round judders to a halt and Beria is ambushed, tried, and executed in a courtyard. It echoes the mockery of the shirtless and mounted Vladimir Putin – before he invaded Ukraine.

An Iannucci line that’s stayed with me comes near the end of the third season of The Thick of It. The famously profane Malcolm Tucker, back from the political dead, has ‘grabbed the initiative’. When someone points out how short-lived this advantage might be, Tucker replies, ‘Well, life is just a succession of five minuteses.’

As I read Russia: Revolution and civil war 1917–1921, this phrase kept returning to me. Antony Beevor’s signature style is to recount World War II battle histories as a dizzying series of ‘five minuteses’, integrating the perspectives of soldiers and civilians at the street level with those of the military and political leaders directing events. This simultaneous perspective of the battles on which the world turned from panoramic and microscopic lenses has made him a rightful master of the enormously popular military history genre.