Will I love The Sleepwalkers?

This book completely changed my understanding of that period of history leading up to 1914, and the myth on which my British cultural identity is founded. That’s a big thing for a book to achieve.

This is a book on one of the most dramatic periods in international history. Why were political leaders and diplomats in the 1910s unable to stop the world’s descent into chaos and global conflict?

In addition to providing exceptional detail on key historical episodes, the book also highlights how easy it is for localized conflict to escalate and expand, with disastrous consequences. 

I usually get bored by very long books too full of dates, people you have never heard of, and endless details, and I am a historian! But I make an exception for this book.

Clark took me back vividly to a period in history that has been covered so often by rewriting the old storylines of WWI with flair and freshness. I came to better understand why World War I was not just a fluke, started by the black swan event of the assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne and his wife in a backwater of the empire… show more.

This is the history I wish I’d learned at school. History has always been an interest of mine, but far too often history books focus on what is possibly best described as the winner’s reason for going to war, or how one ‘nation’ did all these wonderful things… That’s how it is taught at school, and for most of us, that’s all we ever learn.

I count myself fortunate to have had teachers in this subject, like Professor Clark, who taught us to look at the ‘little’ people involved, and especially at how ‘history’ is almost never a single isolated… show more.