In the space of 13 months in 1947-48, the world changed radically in ways that mark it to the present day. Jonathan Fenby will survey this momentous period in modern history spanning the globe and an extraordinary cast of major leaders in talk based on his book Crucible - named as a book of the year by the Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and BBC History magazine.

• The Cold War took root, pitting the Soviet Union and its satellite countries against the United States and its allies. At the head of the world’s richest and most powerful nation, Harry Truman committed the US to a global role and launched the Marshall Plan to revive Western Europe while Josef Stalin dug in behind the Iron Curtain, leading to the Berlin blockade, the Allied airlift and the creation of Nato.

• India and Pakistan became independent nations with a partition that provoked death and devastation on a massive scale - and hostilities that persist to this day.

• The state of Israel was created and the first Israeli-Arab war broke out.

• In China, the Communists gained the upper hand in the civil war that would lead to their conquest of power which, again, has lasted to the present.

• Korea was divided; civil war raged in Greece; apartheid was installed in South Africa; Indonesia gained its independence; Britain went through repeated economic strains as it retreated from empire and the Labour government launched the National Health Service and the welfare state; the defeated powers, West Germany and Japan, set out on the path to economic success; technology marched forward – from the atom bomb to the first microwave oven.