Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
Reread time now:

The Guns of August
You should read this book. It's a genuinely masterful telling of the first month of World War 1, focused on the British, French and German perspectives, and it is absolutely captivating. Seriously, this is one of the most suspenseful books I have ever read, and it remains so on rereading it. Many books benefit from not knowing what happens next, I think it takes a rare mastery to deliver a book that becomes more poignant and involving when you know exactly what inevitably happens next, but remain impaled on all the moments where it could have gone differently.
It's a very good book, although the focus on the Western Front somewhat limits it as a work of history, IMO. I've recently been rereading Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, on the factors that lead up to WW1 in the previous couple of decades; it's a fascinating insight into how basically all the countries involved had multiple factions advocating and setting different policies, the complexity of the interactions of different foreign policies, and the various contingent factors that could have lead to very different outcomes in 1914.