From a bestselling historian, a daringly revisionist history of World War I The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a Continental conflict into a world war, which it then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather was the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces. That the war was wicked, horrific, and inhuman is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but also by cold statistics. Indeed, more British soldiers were killed in the first day of the Battle of the Somme than Americans in the Vietnam War. And yet, as Ferguson writes, while the war itself was a disastrous folly, the great majority of men who fought it did so with little reluctance and with some enthusiasm. For anyone wanting to understand why wars are fought, why men are willing to fight them and why the world is as it is today, there is no sharper or more stimulating guide than Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.

Presents an illustrated collection of poems about the waste, horror, and futility of war as well as the nobility, courage, and sacrifice of individuals in wartime.

In this groundbreaking biography, based on more than 10,000 hitherto unavailable letters and diary entries, Niall Ferguson returns to his roots as a financial historian to tell the story of the extraordinary Siegmund Warburg. A refugee from Hitler's Germany, Warburg rose to become the dominant figure in the post-war City of London and one of the architects of European financial integration. Seared by events in the 1930s, when the long-established Warburg bank was first almost destroyed by the Depression and then 'Aryanized' by the Nazis, Warburg was determined that his own bank would learn from the past and contribute to the economic recovery of Britain, the unity of Western Europe and the birth of globalization. Siegmund Warburg was a complex and ambivalent man, as much a psychologist, politician and actor-manager as a banker. In High Financier Niall Ferguson reveals Warburg's idiosyncracies but above all he recaptures the meticulous business methods and strict ethical code that set Warburg apart from the mere speculators and traders who inhabit today's financial world.

“The very content of Owen’s poems was, and still is, pertinent to the feelings of young men facing death and the terrors of war.” —The New York Times Book Review Wilfred Owen was twenty-two when he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifle Corps during World War I. By the time Owen was killed at the age of 25 at the Battle of Sambre, he had written what are considered the most important British poems of WWI. This definitive edition is based on manuscripts of Owen’s papers in the British Museum and other archives.

What if there had been no American War of Independence? What if Hitler had invaded Britain? What if Kennedy had lived? What if Russia had won the Cold War? Niall Ferguson, author of the highly acclaimed The Pity of War, leads the charge in this historically rigorous series of separate voyages into “imaginary time” and provides far-reaching answers to these intriguing questions.Ferguson's brilliant 90-page introduction doubles as a manifesto on the methodology of counter-factual history. His equally masterful afterword traces the likely historical ripples that would have proceeded from the maintenance of Stuart rule in England. This breathtaking narrative gives us a convincing, detailed “alternative history” of the West—from the accession of “James III” in 1701, to a Nazi-occupied England, to a U.S. Prime Minister Kennedy who lives to complete his term.

Herbert considers why the Victorian public saw the Indian Mutiny of 1857-59 as an epochal event and offers a view of this episode, and of Victorian imperialist culture more generally.

A selection of poetry written during World War I. In the introduction Jon Silkin traces the changing mood of the poets - from patriotism through anger and compassion to an active desire for social change. The book includes work by Sassoon, Owen, Blunden, Rosenberg, Hardy and Lawrence.

Rarely have the horror and tragedy of war been so graphically--and brilliantly--portrayed as in Robert Fisk's epic account of the Lebanon conflict. A Critical scrutiny of a terrible war that has yet to be resolved.

Few economic events have had a more profound or enduring impact than the German hyperinflation of 1923, still remembered popularly as a root cause of Hitler's rise to power. Yet many historians have argued that inflationary policies were, on balance, advantageous to post-1918 Germany, both boosting growth and helping to reduce reparations. The scholarly consensus is that there was no viable alternative to inflation. In Paper and Iron Niall Ferguson takes a different view. He argues that inflation was indeed an economic and political disaster, and further that there were alternative economic policies which could have stabilised the German currency in 1920. To explain why these were not adopted he points to long-term defects in the political institutions of the Reich which went back as far as the 1890s and which persisted beyond 1918. The book therefore reveals the Wilhelmine origins of Weimar's failure, as well as casting light on the origins of the Third Reich.

The best known of the 'War poets' of World War I, Owen died a week before the armistice. His powerful verse expresses the intensity of the suffering on the Western front.