A colleague of mine, a distinguished professor of English language, once remarked in frustration after doing some background reading on the First World War, “Can’t you historians agree about anything?” I fear that I will need to keep her away from this collection. I have rarely seen a contributor to any edited work launching such an intemperate attack on their fellow contributors as Julian Putkowski does in his essay in this book!

But that only scratches the surface of the eccentricity. Cramming twenty-two essays into a book with about 220 pages in the main text was always going to be a tall order, but in these constrained circumstances allowing Terry Castle twenty-three pages for her autobiographical stream of consciousness seems reckless. The essay is fascinating, but it is beyond critical comment from a historical point of view.

Perhaps the striking thing is the extent to which this collection belies the title. The essays collected here seem to exist in a self-contained world largely unconnected with the rest of twentieth-century British history and historiography. There is no conventional political history, no economic history, and no diplomatic history, and the social/cultural history is singularly focused on the experience of combatants to the near total exclusion of the civilian majority; partial exceptions are an essay by Jane Potter on women and the armistice and excellent essays by Stephen Badsey and Nicholas Reeves on aspects of propaganda. Two very interesting essays—one by Santanu Das on India and one by Michael Burleigh on religion—are not really about Britain at all.

In essence, the majority of the essays cover two topics—the military dimension of the war and the cultural legacy of the war, including the cultural politics of memory. What holds these two themes together is the assertion, by military historians, represented in this collection by Gary Sheffield, Brian Bond, and Dan Todman, that the cultural legacy of the war has shaped the popular understanding of the military history of the war and that this shaping has generally amounted to a distortion that has prevented an accurate version of that military history being accepted as part of the standard narrative of modern British history.

The essays on the military history and the one by Nick Hewitt on the naval battle of Jutland are brief introductory comments on the state of historiography. The essays on the cultural memory of war represent a series of case studies. Terry Charman's brief history of the Imperial War Museum, Dominic Hibberd's introduction to the history of anthologies of Great War poetry, and Tony Pollard's introduction to trench archaeology stand out as useful scholarly contributions to important ”sites of memory.” Ian Bostridge's essay on Britten's War Requiem is suggestive and would have benefited from pursuing its ideas at greater length; much the same can be said of Gavin Stamp's discussion of war memorials. But the problem of the format is serious: ten-page essays are inadequate to present detail sufficient to satisfy specialists, and they do not allow much room to convince a nonspecialist why they should care about these topics. Putkowski, in his eloquent essay on the “shot at dawn controversy,” and, from the opposing viewpoint, Brian Bond, in his essay on “disenchantment,” are possibly the only contributors to manage that.

In short, this collection suggests a field that is in an interesting creative ferment but at the same time is in danger of tipping into solipsism. First World War revisionism started out in a relationship to a predominant grand narrative of twentieth-century Britain in terms of “declinism,” but as that grand narrative has itself fallen apart, it is no longer clear what any of this now relates to. This is the question we need to address as the war finally passes beyond living memory and as the centenary approaches.