The story of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, when for six extraordinary months the city was at the centre of world government as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals and prejudices of the settlement brokers.

Features the single-minded Admiral von Tirpitz; the ambitious Winston Churchill; the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow; Britain's greatest 20th-century Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey; and Jacky Fisher, the eccentric admiral who revolutionized the British Navy and brought forth for the first true battleship, HMS Dreadnought.

In this study of World War I the author presents the military conflict, the battles on land, sea and in the air, together with interpretations of military events. He also shows how the war also acted as an engine for social change which shapes our world today.

By the end of 1914, the battered British forces were bogged down, yet hopeful that promised reinforcements would soon lead to a victorious breakthrough. A year later, after losses at Aubers Ridge, Loos, and Neuve Chapelle fighting seemed set to go on for ever. This book evokes the soldiers' dogged heroism, and terrible loss of innocence.

In August 1914, two navies in the world confronted each other across the North Sea. At first there were skirmishes, then battles off the coasts of England and Germany and in the far corners of the world. This book is about leadership and command, bravery and timidity, and, genius and folly.

* A unique record of one woman's experience of twenty-five of the most cataclysmic years in modern history - and a Virago Classic bestseller - with a new introduction by Mark Bostridge