Antiques Roadshow: World War I in 100 Family Treasures

Apr 19, 2025 5:06 AM

Author:Paul Atterbury

To mark the centenary of the start of World War I, the Antiques Roadshow team filmed a series of specials at the Somme, where the public brought in their family's war memorabilia and photographs. These 'antiques' weren't financially valuable, or in some cases even very beautiful, but the stories that came attached to these momentoes were priceless.

Antiques Roadshow: World War I in 100 Family Treasures takes 100 of the most fascinating and moving stories and shows how they fit in to the wider history that was occuring around them. From Rifleman Frank Edwards, who led the 'big push' in September 1915 kicking a football in front of the troops (and survived to tell the tale) to the formidable Catherine Murray Roy, one of the first 50 nurses to be sent to the front lines in France. The story behind each object paints an intimate portrait of a long-lost relative, and quotes from the modern-day participants in the roadshow provide a moving link between the families then and now.

Fully illustrated, and featuring all the stories from the show, this is a truly unique way of telling the story of those ordinary lives that were, by the onset of war in 1914, thrown into the most extraordinary of circumstances.

Reviews

The Devils' Alliance is a marvellous achievement. No event was more crucial to the outbreak of the Second World War than the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, and no one is better qualified to explore its grim implications than Roger Moorhouse

—— Norman Davies

Superbly researched and academically impeccable, yet written with all the pace of a thriller, The Devils' Alliance shines a powerful beam into one of the undeservedly least known aspects of the Second World War

—— Andrew Roberts

Meticulous and vividly readable… Moorhouse’s grim and compelling book could not be more topical

—— Sunday Telegraph

A highly enjoyable history written with verve and attention to detail

—— Financial Times

Superb

—— Brendan Simms , Wall Street Journal

Authoritative and highly readable

—— Lawrence James , The Times

Lucid and well-researched

—— Keith Lowe , Mail on Sunday

Elegant

—— Independent

Moorhouse is the best guide now available to explain…the awful consequences for those caught in the unscrupulous coils of dictatorship

—— Richard Overy , Literary Review

Thorough and eloquent... a scholarly yet accessible reminder of the frighteningly tangible costs of totalitarianism

—— New Statesman

Roger Moorhouse’s definitive book blends eyewitness accounts with an authoritative master narrative… The Devils’ Alliance is not just a good book, it’s an important one, making a significant contribution to our understanding of the two worst dictators of the 20th Century, and the calamitous conflict they both had a hand in causing

—— History of War Magazine

In this profoundly researched, briskly argued and wonderfully readable book, full of dramatic and darkly comic detail, Roger Moorhouse has done history a great service. He has rescued one of the Second World War’s dirtiest little secrets from the shadows into which the pro-Soviet bias of post-war historians had swept it and reveals in all its moral squalor the deal that made it possible for Hitler to go to war.

—— Professor Adam Zamoyski

A terrifying account of cynical diplomacy, deceit, untrammelled power and the echoes that can be heard even now

—— Sinclair McKay , Daily Telegraph

Authoritative, highly readable account.

—— Lawrence James , The Times

Intelligent, well-informed.

—— Evan Mawdsley , BBC History Magazine

Has a lot more to offer than the usual facts and figures thrown together about a largely forgotten part of history… This has a certain amount of written fluidity… I have read any number of books about this subject and I have to say that this is one of the best researched that I have found… I found it a satisfying read throughout, I learnt a lot and filled in a few holes in my knowledge, an excellent book.

—— Reg Seward , Nudge

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