Antony Beevor

Dinner hosted by Their Graces The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough and Antonio Simoes, chief executive of HSBC Bank plc, in the presence of HRH The Duke of Gloucester KG GCVO.

Join renowned military historian Antony Beevor for a black tie literary dinner in the magnificent surroundings of the Blenheim Palace Orangery and hear him talk about the greatest battle of the war for Western Europe.

Hitler launched his last gamble in the forests and gorges of the Ardennes on the Belgian/German border in December 1944.  The offensive involved more than a million men. The generals doubted its success but younger and more junior officers were desperate to believe that it could save them from the Red Army approaching from the East. Beevor explains how the Ardennes was the battle that finally broke the German fighting machine and paved the way for the Red Army’s final onslaught on Berlin.

Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst. He left the Army to write and his award-winning novels and works of non-fiction have sold more than four million copies. Stalingrad won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, and Berlin received the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award. His other well-known works include D Day – The Battle for Normandy and The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

Dinner is preceded by a reception in the Duke of Marlborough’s beautiful Italian Gardens. The price of this event includes reception, drinks, dinner, wines and a copy of Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble, which you can have signed by the author.

Previous speakers at the festival dinner have been:
Richard Holmes (2008)
Andrew Roberts (2009)
Peter Snow (2010)
Sir Terry Wogan (2011)
Frederick Forsyth (2012)
Lucy Worsley (2013)
Jonathan Miller (2014).

Sponsored by HSBC.