One of Penguin's bestselling non-fiction authors, Niall Ferguson has been hailed as the most brilliant historian of his generation for his fresh, provocative and controversial approach to subjects ranging from money to empires. 1914: Why the World Went to War has been specially adapted from Ferguson's bestselling The Pity of War (1998). It is a radical reassessment of how the world hurtled into catastrophe in 1914.

When the statesmen who took Europe to war in 1914 came to write their memoirs, they agreed on one thing: the war had been inevitable - the result of such vast historical forces that no human agency could have prevented it. 'The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war,' wrote David Lloyd George in a famous passage in his War Memoirs. Nor was this the only metaphor he employed to convey the vast, impersonal forces at work. The war was a 'cataclysm', a 'typhoon' beyond the control of the statesmen. As Big Ben struck 'the most fateful hour' on 4 August, it 'echoed in our ears like the hammer of destiny. I felt like a man standing on a planet that had been suddenly wrenched from its orbit and was spinning wildly into the unknown'.

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