'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...
Norman Stone (1941-2019) was one of Britain’s most celebrated historians. He was the author of The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (winner of the Wolfson Prize and published by Penguin), Europe Transformed and The Atlantic and its Enemies. He taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Bilkent.
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