If he is right, much of the standard account of the outbreak of war being touted about the place this week is seriously wrong. Professor Tooze’s is the bigger and more momentous book, but Professor Newton’s is the more passionate and the more iconoclastic. Biggs Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale, published by Allen Lane The second is : The Deluge: the Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, by Adam Tooze, Barton M. The first is : The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War 1914, by Douglas Newton, formerly Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Sydney, published by Verso. What I write here today has another purpose, to share with my readers as much as possible the lessons from two excellent and original books on the war and its consequences, which I have been reading during the past month. I linked, the other day, to an essay in the American Spectator, ‘the Foul Tornado’, in which I gave my general opinion of this disaster. So now we come to that distinguished thing, the one hundredth anniversary of the War that Ended Peace, the Great War, the Apocalypse, the End of Christendom, the War that Ended the British Empire or, if you prefer, the Great War for Civilization.

The deluge tooze