Product details
Biographical note
Norman Stone is one of Britain's most celebrated historians. For the period 1984-97 he was Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Professor Stone's publications include The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (Winner of the Wolfson Prize and published by Penguin) Hitler and Europe Transformed. He lives in Oxford and Istanbul.Bold, provocative and witty ... one of the outstanding historians of our age
Spectator
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
One of the most original modern commentaries on the conflict ... this stimulating work can be read for pleasure in an afternoon, even if you are not particularly interested in World War One. That truly is the mark of a great history book
Evening Standard
Exhilarating ... scintillating ... a heady cocktail
Observer
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
A corker of a book ... brings more clarity to this complex, much-written about subject than some historians manage to do in books three or four times as long
History Today
'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
In 1914 a new kind of war, and a new kind of world, came about. Fourteen million combatants died, a further twenty million were wounded, four empires were destroyed and even the victors' empires were fatally damaged. The First World War marked a revolution in the technology of slaughter as trench warfare, artillery barrages, tanks and chemical warfare made their mark on the battlefield for the first time.
The sheer complexity and scale of the war have encouraged historians to write books on a similar scale. But in only 140 pages, Norman Stone distils a lifetime of teaching, arguing and thinking to reframe the overwhelming disaster whose aftershocks shaped the rest of the twentieth century.
'Bold, provocative and witty ... one of the outstanding historians of our age' Spectator
'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