Origins First World War

This thoroughly revised edition has been updated to incorporate recent case studies, biographies, syntheses, journal articles and scholarly conferences that appeared in conjunction with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 2014.

D.C.B Lieven, "Russia and the Origins of the First World War"

The immediate reason for Russia's involvement in the First World War lay in the decisions taken by statesmen and generals during July 1914. No history of the origins of the war could therefore fail to pay considerable attention to the July crisis. The crisis did not, however, exist in a void. On the contrary, it was the latest in a series of diplomatic conflicts which in the decade prior to 1914 had raised international tensions almost to the breaking point.

Television has tended to look at the First World War through a veil of tears, seeing only a tragic waste of life in the mud of Flanders. This definitive series strips away ninety years of myopia to get back to the reality of the war.