World War One: A Short History

In World War One- A Short History, Norman Stone provides a terse, opinionated and wry short history of the First World War.

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 140 pages, Norman Stone distils a lifetime of teaching, arguing and thinking to reframe the overwhelming disaster whose aftershocks shaped the rest of the twentieth century.

‘Bold, provocative and witty … one of the outstanding historians of our age’

Spectator

‘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

‘Exhilarating … scintillating … a heady cocktail’

Observer

‘Entertaining and insightful … one of the handful of living historians who can write with style and wit’

Tibor Fischer, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

Norman Stone is one of Britain’s most celebrated historians. He is the author of The Eastern Front, 1914-1917, Hitler- An Introduction, Europe Transformed and The Atlantic and its Enemies. He has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Bilkent, where he is now Director of the Turkish-Russian Centre.