Century

CENTURY is an award-winning history of the twentieth century told in photographs. More than any other, the last century was a period of unforeseeable advances, discoveries and victories as well as unanticipated atrocities and suffering, and it was the first century to have been entirely documented by the camera. Thus the chronological sequence of images in this book takes us on a journey through the trenches of the First World War, the virgin flight of the Wright brothers, the rise of unspeakable political regimes, the antics of Buster Keaton, the odyssey into outer space and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Culled from sources all over the world, the photographs are immediate and thought-provoking. They depict people and events, both famous and unknown, from the worlds of politics and war, art and invention, culture and social history. Accompanied by extended historical background information for every scene depicted, as well as evocative contemporary literary and political quotations, CENTURY is as much a historical education as an enlightening visual display of familiar and unknown times. Conceived and edited by the former picture editor of London's Sunday Times Magazine, CENTURY is the culmination of Bruce Bernard's thirty years' work in the industry.

This extraordinary book is now available in a new edition: small enough to be held in the palm of one hand, it has also been extended to accommodate events up to and including 11 September 2001 - an inescapable and poignant punctuation mark for any survey of modern history.