Book description
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 and prosperity which we associate with the
Victorian era. It unleashed both the demons of the twenieth century -
pestilence, military destruction and mass death - and the ideas which
continue to shape our world today - modernism in the arts, new
approaches to psychology and medicine, and radical ideas about economics
and society. An event of this scale and complexity needs a great
historian to portray it, and 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, and this too is brilliantly conveyed in Keegan's
fascinating and magisterial work. John Keegan is the Defence Editor of
the
Daily Telegraph
and Britain's foremost military historian. The Reith Lecturer in 1998,
he is the author of many bestselling books including The Face of Battle
, Six Armies in Normandy
, Battle at Sea
, The Second World War
, A History of Warfare
(awarded the Duff Cooper Prize), Warpaths
, The Battle for History
, Intelligence in War
and, most recently, The Iraq War
. For many years John Keegan was the Senior Lecturer in Military History
at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and he has been a Fellow of
Princeton University and Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at
Vassar. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received
the OBE in the Gulf War honours list, and was knighted in the Millennium
honours list in 1999. John Keegan died in August 2012.
