It is a bunch of misguided leaders bringing destruction upon millions. At the same time, the leaders are not crucified either. Although Keegan does try to balance strategic explanations of the war with journals and other first-hand accounts, there is not nearly enough – for my tastes anyway – about the conditions soldiers served in, what they talked about, how they lived, what kind of social effects obtained in these countries during the war, how women and families coped while all the men in Europe were off shooting each other. It is quite a narrowly military approach.

A good biography can really help you understand the personalities involved in prosecuting the Great War. As such, some of the best books on WW1 are biographies of its main actors. Essentially, he says the world changes—or begins to change—with the performance of The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky in Paris in 1913. It’s an interesting thesis, but it’s wrong. You don’t have to be much of a cultural historian to know that modernism is often seen to pre-date that by quite a long way. People like Debussy and Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde are often seen as modernists in some sense. He also conflates modernism and modernity in a way that is not terribly helpful. He talks about this tiny coterie of avant-garde artists as if that’s what everyone in the country thought. That’s inevitably not true. In another part of that leave, he goes to a beer garden, and there are all these old men talking about how to win the war. And he thinks to himself: these men don’t understand that the purpose of life is to sit in a beer garden and drink beer. They think it’s to win the war, but I’ve been to the war and I know that they are wrong. For beginners, Sir Michael Howard’s aptly titled The First World War: A Very Short Introduction might be the ideal entry point. Historian and Author John Boff describes Howard’s work as “the best, single, short introduction to the whole First World War. Nearly a century has passed since the outbreak of World War I, yet as military historian Hew Strachan (winner of the2016 Pritzker Literature Award)argues in this brilliant and authoritative new book, the legacy of the “war to end all wars” is with us still. The First World War was a truly global conflict from the start, with many of the most decisive battles fought in or directly affecting the Balkans, Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. Even more than World War II, the First World War continues to shape the politics and international relations of our world, especially in hot spots like the Middle East and the Balkans.

Best World War One books by type

Image: Robert Graves' Good-bye to All That is a seminal autobiographical work detailing the author's frontline experiences. None of the countries involved were prepared for a long war (or even for a short one). And accordingly, hardly any army had made real progress in 4 years. The war was conducted mostly in stalemate. Where progress was made it (what little of it) was more due to one army folding up from exhaustion, moral or material. A Soldier’s Friend from Megan Rix shares the fictional story of the cat Mouser and her doggy friend Sammy and how cats and dogs were used for tasks like sharing messengers or hunting rats to aid their human companions.

As well as Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August, several significant works on the causes of World War One have been published over the years. Given this was a real place, and it features real people, do you know how closely it reflects historical events? The reason he’s like that is that he’s been completely broken by the things he’s had to do in this war, and especially by the loss of a friend. It’s also about how this man, who really has no business being in a wet French trench, is being completely distorted and ruined by this war. The people who brought him there, who intentionally crafted him into this savage beast are then so horrified by what he’s now turned into.

We hope this article has proven that the best book to read on World War 1 really depends on what you’re looking for. There is no right or wrong answer! Trench warfare may not seem like a great environment for literary exploration, but it provided the catalyst for some of the 20 th century’s most important literature. See Inside the First World War was written by Rob Lloyd Jones and illustrated by Maria Cristine Prite. It’s a fully illustrated flap book, with beautifully drawn scenes of the war from its 1914 beginnings through to its 1918 conclusion. It’s a great World War One picture book for young book lovers. I only dipped into a few chapters, one was about the atmosphere in Berlin on the eve of the war. It was very evocative. Later, there’s a chapter about All Quiet on the Western Front, and how Adolf Hitler spent a lot more time in the trenches than the author of that book. I found it very readable, but I wasn’t sure how it all held together, necessarily. Parts of Good-bye to All That were questioned and challenged by Graves’s contemporaries, including Siegfried Sassoon. Graves and Sassoon were good friends, and both had suffered psychological and physical trauma from their time in the trenches.