Rupert Brooke
Page 71
Peace & War: Britain in 1914
1914 dawned with Britain at peace, albeit troubled by faultlines within and threats without: Ireland trembled on the brink of civil war; suffragette agitation was assuming an ever more violent hue; and suspicions of Germany’s ambitions bred a paranoia that was expressed in a rash of ‘invasion scare’ literature. When shots rang out in Sarajevo on 28 June, they set in train a tumble of diplomatic dominoes that led to Britain declaring war on Germany on 4 August, ushering in four years of global conflict.
Nigel Jones portrays every facet of a year that changed Britain for ever: from gun-running in Ulster to an attack by suffragettes on Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery; from the launch of the ocean liner HMHS Britannic to the publication of the avant-garde magazine BLAST; and from the whirl of Edwardian high society’s ‘last summer’ to the embarkation for Belgium of the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force (arrogantly dismissed by the German Kaiser as ‘a contemptible little army’), he traces the events of a momentous year from benign domestic beginnings to descent into the nightmare of European war.
Stylishly written, and embellished by more than eighty gloriously evocative images of the period, Peace and War offers a memorable and moving portrait of a society and a nation on the brink.
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The story starts here
First published in Great Britain in 1999
by Richard Cohen Books, an imprint of Metro Publishing Limited.
This edition published in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Nigel Jones 1999, 2014
Jacket design: www.asmithcompany.co.uk
Jacket image: © Getty Images (Culture Club)
The moral right of Nigel Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
A CIP record of this book is available on request from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN (HB) 9781781857168
(E) 9781781857151
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