Disputing Disaster

A group portrait of six of the finest historians of the First World War

In A Sextet on the Great War, Perry Anderson picks out from the highly charged historiography on the First World War one leading historian from each of the major powers that survived the conflagration.

Fritz Fischer, famous historian of German war-guiltPierre Renouvin, a disabled serviceman and preeminent authority on the conflict in FranceLuigi Albertini, the Italian newspaper tycoon who unlike any other scholar on the Grear War was himself a leading actor in pitching his country into itPaul W. Schroeder, the American expert on the system of European interstate relations and its breakdown in 1914Keith Wilson, the one radical deviant from a patriotic consensus in Britain about the country’s role in the outbreak of the fightingFrom Australia (a dominion dragooned into the Great War by the British), Christopher Clark, acclaimed author of The Sleepwalkers and Revolutionary Spring
A Sextet on the Great War is a compelling analytical guide to the finest competing accounts of the First World War’s origins.