The Sleepwalkers

Formidable … one of the most impressive and stimulating studies of the period ever published – Max Hastings * Sunday Times *Easily the best book ever written on the subject … A work of rare beauty that combines meticulous research with sensitive analysis and elegant prose. The enormous weight of its quality inspires amazement and awe … Academics should take note: Good history can still be a good story * Washington Post *A lovingly researched work of the highest scholarship. It is hard to believe we will ever see a better narrative of what was perhaps the biggest collective blunder in the history of international relations – Niall Ferguson[Reading The Sleepwalkers], it is as if a light had been turned on a half-darkened stage of shadowy characters cursing among themselves without reason … [Clark] demolishes the standard view … The brilliance of Clark’s far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue … In conception, steely scholarship and piercing insights, his book is a masterpiece – Harold Evans * New York Times Book Review *Impeccably researched, provocatively argued and elegantly written … a model of scholarship * Sunday Times Books of the Year *Superb … effectively consigns the old historical consensus to the bin … It’s not often that one has the privilege of reading a book that reforges our understanding of one of the seminal events of world history * Mail Online *A monumental new volume … Revelatory, even revolutionary … Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable * Boston Globe *Superb … One of the great mysteries of history is how Europe’s great powers could have stumbled into World War I … This is the single best book I have read on this important topic – Fareed ZakariaA meticulously researched, superbly organized, and handsomely written account * Military History *Clark is a masterly historian … His account vividly reconstructs key decision points while deftly sketching the context driving them … A magisterial work * Wall Street Journal *

Christopher Clark is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College. He is the author of The Politics of Conversion, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Iron Kingdom. Widely praised around the world, Iron Kingdom became a major bestseller. He has been awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Sleepwalkers was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize, and is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, French Prix Aujourd hui, Cundill Recognition of Excellence Prize, Bruno Kreisky Prize for Political Literature and the Braunschweiger Geschichtspreis.

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