Dimensions
156 x 234 x 14mm
A fascinating analysis of the history of the 20th Century from an historian who has brought the study of military history into the mainstream of historical research.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, nostalgia for a lost past seems to have permeated the whole of European culture. This was the time of bucolic idylls of English musicians and poets of the Edwardian age with revivals of folk music and yearning for blue remembered hills. But thirteen million men died in the First World War and an entire world died with them. By then only rational, bureaucratic, effectively modernized states could fight such wars, with weapons designed to inflict maximum destruction. The tone for a new century was set. For if the old order died with the First World War, something else far more powerful and sinister was born, the 'rough beast; of Yeats' apocalyptic poem , that was to dominate Europe for the rest of the century. In spite of the peace of 1945, it remains alive and flourishing in many parts of the world. Such in part is the thesis of this powerfully argued book but its sub themes are skillfully interwoven and propounded.
