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T. G. Otte

Statesman of Europe

  • Statesman of Europe

  • A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020

    'The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.' The words of Sir Edward Grey, looking out from the windows of the Foreign Office in early August 1914, are amongst the most famous in European history, and encapsulate the impending end of the nineteenth-century world.

    The man who spoke them was Britain's longest-ever serving Foreign Secretary (in a single span of office) and one of the great figures of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Statesman of Europe is a magnificent portrait of an age and describes the three decades before the First World War through the prism of his biography, which is based almost entirely on archival sources and presents a detailed account of the main domestic and international events, and of the main personalities of the era. In particular, it presents a fresh understanding of the approach to war in the years and months before its outbreak, and Grey's role in the unfolding of events.

Thomas Otte is Professor of Diplomatic History at the University of East Anglia and a leading historian of British foreign policy. He is the author or editor of some eighteen books, including the acclaimed July Crisis:The World's Descent into War, Summer 1914 and The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign Policy 1865-1914. He has been an adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

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