World War One: A Short History

The First World War was the overwhelming disaster from which everything else in the twentieth century stemmed. Fourteen million combatants died, four empires were destroyed, and even the victors' empires were fatally damaged. World War I took humanity from the nineteenth century forcibly into the twentiethand then, at Versailles, cast Europe on the path to World War II as well.InWorld War One, Norman Stone, one of the world's greatest historians, has achieved the almost impossible task of writing a terse and witty short history of the war. A captivating, brisk narrative,World War Oneis Stone's masterful effort to make sense of one of the twentieth century's pivotal conflicts.

Norman Stone is the author of World War One, The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (winner of the Wolfson Prize), and Europe Transformed. He has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Bilkent, where he is now Director of the Turkish-Russian Center. He lives in Oxford and Istanbul.