To scholars of Anglo-German relations, and of the origins of the Great War more generally, the title The Pity of War may prompt some consternation. This allusion to Wilfred Owen, after all, was the title Niall Ferguson gave to his controversial (but bestselling) 1998 account of the First World War. The chief premise of that work was that the Great War was a tragic event that need never have occurred, one that destroyed a benevolent global system founded on the formal and informal British Empire and pushed the world down the blind alley of state interventionism and socialism, away from the “natural” path of liberalism and free trade. In Miranda Seymour's The Pity of War the account takes a far more personal approach to what is essentially a similar narrative: how tragic it was that conflict between Britain and Germany in the twentieth century shattered what had been one of the most fruitful international relationships of modern times. The shattering of that relationship led to world-shaking catastrophes, yes, but for Seymour, the real tragedy lies in the way transnational families and friendships were annihilated, suspicion was fostered, and love replaced by hate.

If all this sounds very much like a romance novel rather than a work of history, then this is no coincidence. Seymour is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a popular biographer, and an acclaimed novelist. She has written The Pity of War not as a scholarly investigation of Anglo-German relations across several centuries but as a means of accounting for a sense of something missing from her own past: German family connections that—following the Second World War—were neglected or forgotten. As such, she has produced a book more akin to a value-neutral celebration of Anglo-German relations than an analytical history. And as such, the original British title of the book—Noble Endeavours: The Life of Two Countries, England and Germany, in Many Stories—was a far more appropriate (if verbose) title. Her book is a noble endeavour, with a high-minded purpose of encouraging readers to forget the negatives of Anglo-German relations and “only connect” (in the words of E. M. Forster, from his 1910 Howards End). Like many noble endeavours, however, it is not without its flaws.

One key flaw is Seymour's rather myopic focus on the nobility (whether that status be by birth or by acquired eminence). Her stories seem skewed heavily towards the relationships and interactions of royalty, aristocrats, and the literati; and a glance at her list of acknowledgements contains almost as many titles as it does surnames. Although this is in part a reflection of the available evidence, one gets a sense that Seymour values these upper-echelon voices more than those of the lower orders. One will therefore encounter many a Mitford or Mountbatten in The Pity of War but seldom be given insight into the life of the German waiter or nanny who attended the great and the good (and the not-so-good). That Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are dealt with rather summarily between pages 51 and 52 is a further indicator of the class pretensions of the book, although one of the more compelling narratives pursued by Seymour is that of the German Hospital in London's East End—this is the kind of “entanglement” history (crossing national and class lines) that can really make one think.

Seymour's breadth of scope is impressive and covers four hundred years of Anglo-German engagement (a longer trajectory than any other similar account). There are some serious scholars amongst the names she acknowledges at the end of the book: Edgar Feuchtwanger, Panikos Panayi, and Sir Ian Kershaw stand out. There is also evidence of significant archival work in the (extremely limited) references: Yad Vashem, the Broughton Archive, the British Library, and the Royal Archives.

But what The Pity of War possesses in breadth, it lacks in depth. Most of what Seymour presents—in a lucid, broad-brush account—is already well known. Seymour's “signboard” of useful works for further reading is full of standard works and memoirs, but troublingly devoid of much of the most recent, considered, scholarly literature on Anglo-German relations. This is particularly noticeable given her focus is largely on the nineteenth century (much of the 450-odd pages of text is devoted to this, the period of most intense scholarly activity over the past decade or more). There is no mention of Matthew Potter's Inspirational Genius of Germany (2012), Jan Rüger's Great Naval Game (2009), or Thomas Weber's Our Friend ‘the Enemy’ (2008). Though it is good to see Karina Urbach's collection, Royal Kinship: Anglo-German Family Networks, 1815–1918 (2008), in the mix, surely some time should have been given to the essays in Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwarth's Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain (2008). Seymour would have found some kindred spirits in that volume. One also wonders if Seymour might have better spent her time (the book apparently took five years) by working more closely with her “patient German teacher” in order to access the wealth of German-language source material and scholarship that is available on this subject.

This book is certainly entertaining, and such was the eloquence of the prose and the ease of conceptual framework that it was only a matter of a day or so to read the book cover to cover. It is refreshing to see such an emphasis on Anglo-German cooperation in the sphere of public history. But is Seymour's book a novel contribution to the broader literature on Anglo-German relations? Perhaps.

The strength of the book is in the telling of compelling, individual stories against a backdrop of power politics. In this, it is more a companion to Richard Milton's 2004 offering, Best of Enemies, than a real groundbreaker in terms of historical insight (like the late John Ramsden's Don't Mention the War of 2006). In exploring interpersonal relationships—albeit largely concentrated on the middle and upper classes—Seymour provides a useful reminder that the past was inhabited by emotional human beings, whose chief concerns were not exclusively the stuff of Great Power politics. But here, too, it is disappointing that she tends to treat her subjects as ingénues—victims of someone else's disagreements—rather than the very people who contributed to the great eruption that divided their two countries in 1914, and again in 1939.