Inevitably, the book invites comparison with A.J.P. Taylor’s The First World War: An Illustrated History. Taylor’s book is still in print, and has not lost its lustre, though it belongs to its period, the Sixties, and did much to influence that generation. It started with a huge advantage — the first world war had been in eclipse, but was just coming back into fashion, assisted by Joan Littlewood’s satirical revue, Oh! What a Lovely War. For a while new scholarly books on the war were slow to appear, the public papers on the period being only just released. Taylor, a Macaulay of his time, dominated the field. Today, by contrast, Stone’s book appears alongside dozens of challenging histories of the same war, and, undeservedly, is more easily lost in the crowd. Besides, Taylor was allowed excellent photographs on every page, with opportunities to amuse his readers with captions such as ‘Lloyd George casts an expert eye over munitions girls’. Stone’s publishers might consider an illustrated edition.
Both books are bold, provocative and witty. Taylor has been called ‘the last Shavian’ — like Shaw he frequently flung out perverse views to provoke attention to supposedly deeper verities. As a scholar, Stone is generally the more scrupulous of the two historians, yet despite a strong streak of cynicism in Taylor I cannot help finding more human feeling in his work. Au fond, Stone’s history is a tale of machines, systems and leaders, while Taylor’s is one of the people who were their victims, and his closing sentences are therefore, to me, more moving. On the other hand his optimism seems less convincing now: with many historians of the Sixties and Seventies, he believed that the war, though terrible and largely unjust, was valuable in destroying undesirable ancien régimes and bringing about social reform. Save in the case of Turkey, Stone sees no such improvement through ‘regime change’ — and that bleaker conclusion seems closer to the truth.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.