"Disputing Disaster is a book unlike any other on the 1914 debate. Anderson digs deep into, between and around the works of his subjects to expose the taproots that feed each project. The result is a monument to a lifetime of reading and writing propelled by the conviction that something is at stake. Fellow Marxists will admire the author’s forensic panache and enjoy the beams of utopian effulgence that dart through the occasional chinks in his text. But even readers who are not ‘unreconstructed Jacobins’ (Anderson’s self-description) will find in it a wealth of sharp and compelling reflections on how and why historians argue as they do, why they rethink, abandon or double down on their positions, and how politics and emotion flow into the writing of history and back out of it into the world."
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n23/christopher-clark/the-murmur-of-engines
#History #Europe #WorldWarI #WWI