In The Sleepwalkers" acclaimed historian & author of " Iron Kingdom" Christopher Clark examines the causes of the First World War. The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car & shoot dead Franz Ferdinand & his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the modern era. An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency it fulfilled its every aim: it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule & it created a powerful new Serbia but it also brought down four great empires killed millions of men & destroyed a civilization. What made a seemingly prosperous & complacent Europe so vulnerable to the impact of this assassination? In " The Sleepwalkers" Christopher Clark retells the story of the outbreak of the First World War & its causes. Drawing on many fresh new sources this account reveals a Europe very different from the familiar picture putting Serbia & the Balkans at the centre of the story. Starting with the brutal assassination of Alexander I of Serbia in 1903 Clark shows how far from being the place of enviable stability it appears to us Europe was racked by chronic problems: a multipolar fractured multicultural world of clashing ideals terrorism militancy & instability which was fatefully saddled with a conspicuously ineffectual set of political leaders. He shows how the rulers of Europe who prided themselves on their modernity & rationalism behaved like sleepwalkers stumbling through crisis after crisis & finally convincing themselves that war was the only answer. Reviews: " Formidable.. .one of the most impressive & stimulating studies of the period ever published". (Max Hastings " Sunday Times"). " The arguments [ Clark] sets out in this quite superb account of the causes of the First World War are so compelling that they effectively consign the old historical consensus to the bin.. .a masterpiece. Its not often that one has the privilege of reading a book that reforges our understanding of one of the seminal events of world history". (" Mail Online"). "A brilliant contribution". (" Times Higher Education"). " Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject. Planting himself at the contingent end of the spectrum he prefers to establish how the war happened rather than to explain why by means of hindsight... It is a refreshing approach. He provides vivid portraits of leading figures...[ He] also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war". (" Irish Times"). About the author: Christopher Clark is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge & a Fellow of St Catharines College. He is the author of " The Politics of Conversion" " Kaiser Wilhelm II" & " Iron Kingdom". Widely praised around the world " Iron Kingdom" became a major bestseller. He has been awarded the Officers Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany."