A brilliant history of the First World War by the bestselling and

prizewinning author of King Leopold”s Ghost and Bury the Chains. Adam

Hochschild follows a group of characters connected by blood ties, close

friendships or personal enmities and shows how the war exposed the

divisions between them. They include the brother and sister whose views on

the war could not have been more diametrically opposed – he a career

soldier, she a committed pacifist; the politician whose job was to send

young men who refused conscription to prison, yet whose godson was one of

those young men and the suffragette sisters, one of whom passionately

supported the war and one of whom was equally passionately opposed to it.

Through these divided families, Hochschild paints a vivid picture of

Britain poised between the optimism of the Victorian era and the era of

Auschwitz and the Gulag – a divided country, fractured by the seismic

upheaval of the Great War and its aftermath.