The Fateful Year: England 1914 by Mark Bostridge
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Blurb: The Fateful Year by Mark Bostridge is the story of England in 1914. War with Germany, so often imagined and predicted, finally broke out when people were least prepared for it.
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Lucy Lethbridge, Financial Times
“The co-author of a biography of Vera Brittain, Bostridge is particularly good on the militant suffragettes … Bostridge has written a truly gripping chronicle of the mood of a nation moving unwittingly towards catastrophe. The shifting tempo of a book like this is difficult to pull off but Bostridge moves deftly between public event and vivid personal experience with sympathy and imagination.”
Anthony Quinn, The Guardian
“As hopes of peace are extinguished, something is lost in the book, too. The ironic undertow disappears, and the narrative momentum rather stalls … There’s no doubting this book’s eye for a good story, or the skill in telling it. I’m not sure there’s a unifying idea to chew on, though, other than Asquith’s favourite axiom: “the Expected does not Happen”. And that is merely the verbal equivalent of a shrug.”
Frances Wilson, London Evening Standard
“While some of the stories told here, like that of the murdered body of a small boy found on a train leaving Chalk Farm station, are of previously unrecorded lives, others describe the lives of those, like the politicians who led us into war, who stood centre-stage. Bostridge clicks the camera shutter down on the sights, smells and sounds of the last scenes of peace and the first acts of battle, creating a masterly snapshot of the nervous moment before the world went mad.”
Rachel Cooke, The Observer
“…for all its many pleasures, for all its wonderful stories, The Fateful Year is sometimes desultory. It left me with the uneasy feeling that its primary engine was a desire to honour an important anniversary rather than the careful unpicking of a knotty new idea.”
Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times
“Anybody writing about 1914 faces the insuperable obstacle of sheer overfamiliarity … Bostridge’s explanation of the causes of the war (a German plot to take over the world) is barely up to A-level standard, and when he tells us that “a spirit of belligerency stalked the land”, you feel like skipping straight to the end. That would be a shame, though, because his book is full of unexpected fascinations, especially when he steers clear of the war and delves into the more obscure corners of Edwardian life.”
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