Antony Beevor’s monumental book, Stalingrad, has been one of the most read and highly praised accounts of the Second World War to have been written in the past twenty-five years. It was also the book that ignited our fascination with the war anew, published, as it was, nearly a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and drawing on previously unseen Russian archives. It was these archives, barely examined by historians, that revealed the depths of the brutality, depravations and horror of one of the most terrible battles in history. In this talk, Antony Beevor discusses this important turning-point in the war, his own search to unlock the truth about that terrible battle, and shares some of the heart-breaking stories he discovered and the lengths he went to in order to foil the guards watching over him in the Moscow archives.