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Journalism of Courage
Niall FERGUSON8217;s latest book, The Ascent of Money, is the perfect recession primer: a comprehensive economic history ready for the moment when most of our inherited economic assumptions have just become history8230; There8217;s one, rather older, book of Ferguson8217;s that is particularly apposite reading this week. The Pity of War, his revisionist, polemical history of the First World War, is a suitable bedside companion for the week before the 90th anniversary of the Armistice. The book is not a conventional narrative history of the war. Rather it takes a variety of assumptions about the war and exposes them to a vigorous, critical scorching.
Ferguson8217;s ultimate conclusion is that the war was an error, that Britain would have been better off standing aside, that German victory would have simply given us an earlier version of the European Union, without the horrors of millions dead, without the loss of our maritime Empire, and with the Kaiser rather than Peter Mandelson as the most glamorous representative of the pan-European governing class. Ferguson8217;s case is designed to provoke. And I am less than sure that Wilhelmine domination of Europe would have been a bureaucratically benign affair. But it does seem increasingly clear to me that the Great War was a tragedy whose dimensions we still struggle to comprehend. In August 1914 it was possible to travel, and trade, freely across a Europe run, mostly, in a tolerant and liberal fashion.
From a comment by Michael Gove in 8216;The Times8217;, London
