This is immediate, unmistakable Hemingway.

Though it is such a well-known story, it has never been told in such depth before. James Holland has mastered every detail

Holland tells the story with gusto and pace... he has truly and brilliantly plugged an enormous gap

Poland's war was so terrible as to almost defy summary ... this book is opinionated, fluid and forceful

An extraordinary experience like nothing ever done before in America that I know of. It’s important. It matters

Quite simply a beautiful book. Mark Byford has a curious nature and a tender heart. I shall never look at a war memorial again without wondering who was the young man whose name is on a wall

A remarkable story that skilfully knits together heroic family history and the broader sweep of the tragedy of the Vietnam war. So moving and thoughtful, there has been no history of that conflict remotely like this one

Superb ... One of the great mysteries of history is how Europe's great powers could have stumbled into World War I ... This is the single best book I have read on this important topic

A meticulously researched, superbly organized, and handsomely written account

Clark is a masterly historian ... His account vividly reconstructs key decision points while deftly sketching the context driving them ... A magisterial work

This compelling examination of the causes of World War I deserves to become the new standard one-volume account of that contentious subject

A brilliant contribution

Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject ... He provides vivid portraits of leading figures ... [He] also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war

In recent decades, many analysts had tended to put most blame for the disaster [of the First World War] on Germany. Clark strongly renews an older interpretation which sees the statesmen of many countries as blundering blindly together into war