[3] Alan was educated at Bradford Grammar School and Wadham College, Oxford, where he studied classics and modern history.

[1] Bullock became widely known to the general public when he appeared on the informational BBC radio program The Brains Trust.

The biography dominated Hitler scholarship for many years and portrayed the German dictator as an opportunistic Machtpolitiker (power politician).

In Bullock's opinion, Hitler was a mountebank and adventurer, devoid of scruples or beliefs, whose actions throughout his career were motivated only by a lust for power.

In his later writings, such as Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1991), Bullock depicted the dictator as more of an ideologue who had pursued the ideas expressed in Mein Kampf and elsewhere despite their consequences.

In 1991, John Campbell said of it: "Although written so soon after the end of the war and despite a steady flow of fresh evidence and reinterpretation, it has not been surpassed in nearly 40 years: an astonishing achievement".

[15] Bullock's other works included The Liberal Tradition: From Fox to Keynes (1956) (co-edited with Maurice Shock), The Forming of the Nation (1969); Is History Becoming a Social Science?

(1977); The Humanist Tradition in the West (1985); Meeting Teachers' Management Needs (1988); Great Lives of the Twentieth Century (1989); and The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin (1960).

Bullock later chaired the committee of inquiry on industrial democracy commissioned in December 1975 by the second Labour government of Harold Wilson.

"[4] Amikam Nachmani noted how Hitler and Stalin "come out as two blood-thirsty, pathologically evil, sanguine tyrants, who are sure of the presence of determinism, hence having unshakeable beliefs that Destiny assigned on them historical missions—the one to pursue a social industrialized revolution in the Soviet Union, the other to turn Germany into a global empire.