David Reynolds is a fine historian, with a host of prize-winning publications to his name, and The Long Shadow is a fine book. It is both a synthesis and a reinterpretation of his subject—the legacy of the First World War—in transnational context. But this book is primarily written for a British audience, a fact that fundamentally shapes Reynolds's argument and perspective. For as he readily concedes, despite its international and comparative cast, this book focuses disproportionately on the legacy of the war for Britain. It is the dominant, negative, and very narrow perception of the war among the British general public on the eve of the centenary commemorations of the war that is the main target of the book. (The BBC recently aired a documentary series under the same title with Reynolds elucidating his theses onscreen). Reynolds wants the British to understand that for Britain (as opposed to some of the other combatant nations) the impact of the First World War, at least prior to the onset of the Second World War, was not altogether the tragic, futile catastrophe now commonly perceived and sacralized. For Reynolds, this bleak view was the product of the Second World War and the cultural politics of the Cold War that followed. With masterful dispassion, Reynolds first looks broadly at what the war created as well as destroyed up to the Second World War and then looks to the second half of the twentieth century to understand why in Britain, at least, a very narrow view of the war's significance and meaning has taken root.

Putting the British experience into the wider context of Europe and the United States is a welcome contribution, often called for but rarely provided in the recent literature on Britain and the Great War. In Reynolds's comparison, organized thematically in chapters titled “Nations,” “Democracy,” “Empire,” “Capitalism,” “Civilization,” and “Peace,” the postwar experience of continental Europe, especially east and southeast Europe, was far more wrenching than it was for Britain. Not only did the British suffer fewer war causalities, but they managed to escape the destruction of the old political order, the rise of extremist politics, and the subsequent violent ethnic nationalism that would devastate the continent and lead to the larger catastrophe of the Second World War. This section of the book is superbly presented and largely convincing, although one might quibble with Reynolds that Britain was not as exceptional to continental developments as he suggests. For instance, as Adrian Gregory's magnificent The Last Great War (2008) makes clear, a nascent “stab in the bank” myth fueled by far-right-wing activists like Horatio Bottomley was developing in Britain in early 1918. Victory in the conflict forestalled any such development, and we will never know how serious the threat really was. Moreover, Reynolds admits that Ireland's experience after 1918 directly parallels the rise of ethnic nationalism and civil conflict experienced during the interwar period on the continent. But, somewhat oddly, this is painted as an exception that proves the exceptionalism of the British experience.

In the second half of the book Reynolds takes on the issue of why in Britain (and to a degree, in France), in contrast to much of the rest of Europe, the First World War became seen as futile tragedy after 1945 when it was not perceived as such in the two decades after 1918. Reynolds is surely right to suggest that the narrow range of meanings that the war now enjoys in Britain was not dominant in the interwar years, and he suggests that the current view evolved only over the second half of the twentieth century. But readers of this journal who have taken more than a passing interest in scholarship on the First World War over the last twenty-five years will recognize that Reynolds's position here is hardly novel. Ever since Jay Winter's Sites of Memory: Sites of Mourning was published in the early 1990s, there has been a steady stream of books and articles about Britain and the memory and legacy of the First World War, making exactly these points. Military historians such as Gary Sheffield and Brian Bond have long been trying to fundamentally revise perceptions about the significance of the war, its battles, and its leadership. Meanwhile, social, cultural, and gender historians like Susan Grayzel, Adrian Gregory, Nicoletta Gullace, and Janet Watson have fundamentally revised our understanding of the British home front, civilian attitudes, and the fundamental connections between those attitudes and the war and its legacy. Indeed, a number of historians, notably Dan Todman, have also traced the evolving representation of the war over the entirety of the twentieth century. Some of Reynolds's examples in the book are indebted to this body of work.

Put in the context of this now large literature on the changing representation, commemoration, and remembrance of the war, Reynolds's account of the evolving British representation of the war lacks some subtlety and nuance. There is no doubt, as Reynolds argues, that the Second World War had a powerful influence on reshaping how the first was understood (leading to its practical effacement in much of Eastern Europe). But British attitudes toward the war were never static and monolithic, even in the interwar years, and as Todman and others have shown, too much emphasis has been placed on the 1960s as the fulcrum of the swing toward the narrative of the war as futile tragedy. Reynolds is right, too, to question both the fetishization of the trench-bound “Tommy” and of the bitterly ironic poetic canon that represented that experience. But while this critique might well be new to the British lay reader (although I suspect many in the target audience for Reynolds's book will have come across such criticism already), it has been standard fare amongst historical scholarship on the war for more than twenty years.

In short, then, this is a readable and very judicious examination of the First World War's impact and legacy for Britain, put into transnational context. As a synthesis it is powerful. But ultimately it offers little that is novel or surprising for anyone familiar with recent scholarship on the topic.