Britain, Germany and the Winning of The Great War at Sea

Castles Of Steel

Castles of Steel - by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dreadnought -'is decidedly a battleship book: stately, immense and telling a mighty story mightily.' Jan Morris, New Statesman

Robert Massie is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, Dreadnought and The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. He lives in Irvington, New York.

In August 1914 the two greatest navies in the world confronted each other across the North Sea. At first there were skirmishes, then battles off the coasts of England and Germany and in the far corners of the world, including the Falklands. The British attempted to force the Dardanelles with battleships - which led to the Gallipoli catastrophe. As the stalemate on the ground on the Western Front continued, the German Navy released a last strike against the British 'ring of steel'. The result was Jutland, a titanic and brutal battle between dreadnoughts. The knowledge, understanding and literary power Robert K. Massie brings to this story is unparalleled. There will never again be a war like this in which seagoing monsters hurl shells at each other until one side is destroyed. The story is driven by some of the most dramatically intriguing personalities in history: Churchill and Jacky Fisher, Jellicoe and Beatty. And then there were the powerful Germans - von Pohl, Scheer, Hipper, and the grand old fork-bearded genius Tirpitz. Castles of Steel is a book about leadership and command, bravery and timidity, genius and folly, qualities which are of course displayed magnificently by Robert K. Massie's literary mastery.

Robert K Massie

History at its best, a fantastic mix of anecdote, observation and intelligent thinking

Massie tells the story with controlled energy and attention to detail, especially human detail. It has not been told so well before.

He has the supreme gift of making history live in simple, readable language.

Inheritor of Barbara Tuchman's mantle as the English-speaking world's pre-eminent popular historian...Robert K. Massie has now turned his attention to the arms race between Britain and Germany c.1890-1914, the most important precipitant towards the outbreak of the First World War.

This is a book you are bound to enjoy. The set pieces - the naval review of June 1897, the Jameson Raid, The Kaiser's visit to Windsor, Winston Churchill visiting the fleet, "the spring of the panther" - are dramatically recreated. The pen portraits of the political and naval establishments of Wilhelmine Germany and Victorian and Edwardian Britain are brilliantly evoked with a sharp eye for the memorable detail...Massie keeps his complex story under tight control...Monographers like myself can only envy the sheer sweep of Dreadnought and the author's rich palette of colours so deftly applied. Like Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August this is narrative history at its very best. Financial Times

Britain,Germany and the Coming of the Great War

A gripping chronicle of the personal and political rivalries from the birth of Queen Victoria to the unification of Germany during the decades leading up to WW1 from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert K. Massie 
 
2018 marks the centenary of the end of the First World War. How did it all begin? 
 
With the biographer's rare genius for expressing the essence of extraordinary lives, Massie brings to life a crowd of glittering figures: the young, ambitious Winston Churchill; the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow; Britain's greatest twentieth-century Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey; and Jacky Fisher, the eccentric admiral who revolutionised the British Navy and brought forth the battleship, H.M.S. Dreadnought. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstanding and tensions, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in this powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, Dreadnought is history at its most riveting. 
 
‘History at its best, a fantastic mix of anecdote, observation and intelligent thinking’ Dan Snow, Daily Express

Robert K Massie

Praise for Dreadnought

History at its best, a fantastic mix of anecdote, observation and intelligent thinking

Massie tells the story with controlled energy and attention to detail, especially human detail. It has not been told so well before.

He has the supreme gift of making history live in simple, readable language.

History at its best, a fantastic mix of anecdote, observation and intelligent thinking

Massie tells the story with controlled energy and attention to detail, especially human detail. It has not been told so well before.

He has the supreme gift of making history live in simple, readable language.

History at its best, a fantastic mix of anecdote, observation and intelligent thinking

Massie tells the story with controlled energy and attention to detail, especially human detail. It has not been told so well before.

He has the supreme gift of making history live in simple, readable language.

Books by Robert K Massie

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