AS with Stalingrad, Antony Beevor's previous book, Berlin: the Downfall 1945 represents an accumulation of detail from three-and-a-half years of research in Russia, Germany, and numerous other countries.

This has enabled him to recreate the experience of the individual during this terrible and decisive moment of history. In a completely fresh narrative, descriptions, observations on human nature, and vignettes gathered from letters, diaries, interviews with survivors, and documents from 19 archives in different countries form the most important part of the text. They do not just provide a new slant on momentous events, they bring the story to life.

Given the subject matter, Berlin: The Downfall 1945 cannot avoid being a controversial book. In January, 2002, more than three months before its publication, Russian press and television automatically denounced the book's account of rapes by the Red Army against Soviet women slave labourers and girls liberated in Germany. But when making these attacks on the book, they did not know that the relevant facts came from a previously unknown Red Army report passed to Stalin's associate Malenkov. Other Soviet documents from former secret archives reveal further extraordinary stories, such as why Stalin ordered SMERSH to conceal Hitler's body, and then humiliated Marshal Zhukov, the hero of the hour. Documents from another archive offer a startlingly new explanation why Stalin was so desperate to capture Berlin before the Americans and the British.

Despite these, and a number of other new revelations, Berlin: the Downfall 1945 remains, above all, the story of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people -- Germans, Russians and a score of other nationalities -- who were caught up in this terrifying maelstrom, the climax of the pitiless conflict between Hitler and Stalin. (Published by Viking/Penguin at £20).