‘Bold, provocative and witty … one of the outstanding historians of our age’ Spectator. Few conflicts have generated more historical writing than the First World War — yet Norman Stone’s compact, razor-sharp account earns its place on any shelf. In just 140 pages, he distils a lifetime of teaching, arguing and thinking about the war that reshaped the modern world: fourteen million combatants killed, twenty million wounded, four empires destroyed, and even the victors left fatally weakened. Stone traces how 1914 ushered in a new era of industrialised slaughter, with trench warfare, artillery barrages, tanks and chemical weapons transforming the battlefield for the first time. Rather than matching the war’s overwhelming scale with a doorstep volume, he reframes it with clarity and wit — illuminating the aftershocks that shaped the rest of the twentieth century. ‘Entertaining and insightful … one of the handful of living historians who can write with style and wit’ Tibor Fischer, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year. ‘Do we need another history of the First World War? The answer in the case of Norman Stone’s short book is, yes – because of its opinionated freshness and the unusual, sharp facts that fly about like shrapnel’ Literary Review
ISBN 13: 9780141031569
Author: Norman Stone
