
The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unparalleled ferocity far beyond its European epicentre it broke the century of relative peace & prosperity which we associate with the Victorian era. It unleashed both the demons of the twenieth century
- pestilence military destruction & mass death
- & the ideas which continue to shape our world today
- modernism in the arts new approaches to psychology & medicine & radical ideas about economics & society. An event of this scale & complexity needs a great historian to portray it & in his new book John Keegan fulfils a life-long ambition to write the definitive book on the war. It was of course foremost a fascinating new interpretations of the military events. But the war also acted as a formidable engine for social change throughout the world & this too is brilliantly conveyed in Keegans fascinating & magisterial work.