AN episode of The Simpsons concludes with Bart saying there's no such thing as a good war - before reeling off the few exceptions, including the Second World War.

But Norman Davies says the western image of the war as one in which good democrats defeated evil dictators, making the world safe for freedom and decency, is false. In fact it was fought principally between two monstrous totalitarian regimes, one of which afterwards imposed its reign of terror on those countries such as Poland and Ukraine which suffered worst in the fighting.

Davies explains how the vast bulk of European fighting was in the east, with famous western battles barely making the "top ten", then explores how the Nazis and Soviets both practised ethnic cleansing, ruthless expansionism and mass murder on unprecedented scales.

An Eastern European specialist, Davies objects to the conflict's "hijacking" by American writers and directors (he names Stephens Ambrose and Spielberg) to create the myth of a good war, won by tough but good-hearted GIs.

But, as he says himself, history books will reach only a fraction of a movie's audience. I suspect many of Davies' readers will already know some of this story, but he still produces many revelations to surprise even the initiated, and his accounts of human endurance in seemingly unendurable circumstances are genuinely moving.