Ring of Steel

Will be revelatory to most British readers

Simon Heffer, New Statesman BOOKS OF THE YEAR

British historians have tended to view the Great War predominantly from the side of the Allies. Watson has done our understanding an inestimable service by examining these familiar events from the perspective of the Central Powers ... Watson's shift of perspective offers illuminating sidelights ... Watson's balance is at its most strikingly effective in a superlative chapter on Germany's catastrophic decision to launch its U-boat campaign. But it is the lost hordes of East European refugees who create the most haunting images in the immense canvas of this outstanding book

Miranda Seymour, Telegraph

A truly indispensable contribution . . . It is a mark of talent in a historian to take familiar narratives and open them to new interpretation. Mr. Watson's book is a brilliant demonstration of this skill . . . Ring of Steel is a history as much of the emotions that hardship and war produced as of politics or diplomacy . . . Watson manages to mesh his dense bottom-up description with the grand narrative of the war's key moments of decision

Adam Tooze, Wall Street Journal

An immensely authoritative new history of Germany and Austria-Hungary between 1914 and 1918. Watson writes fluently and compellingly, and his remarkable command of the sources offers new insight and information on almost every page. Soundly judged on the many controversial aspects of his topic, Watson is particularly ground-breaking in evoking the popular experience of the conflict and when investigating the atrocities that all too frequently were its accompaniment

David Stevenson (author of 1914-1918)

In Ring of Steel Alexander Watson shows us what it was like to be pierced by the sharp end of the Allied juggernaut. He takes us on an illuminating tour of the German and Austrian trenches, their querulous headquarters, their cold, starving towns, and their increasingly desperate government ministries. This is a fascinating account of the Great War from 'the other side of the hill,' but also an explanation for the chaos that followed: communism, fascism, depression, and Europe's plunge into a Second World War

Geoffrey Wawro (author of A Mad Catastrophe)

The Central Powers' Great War was not waged from the top down. Instead, as Alexander Watson's comprehensively researched and clearly presented analysis demonstrates, in both Germany and Austria-Hungary popular support was vital to mobilizing and sustaining an increasingly-futile conflict

Dennis Showalter (author of Tannenberg: Clash of Empires 1914)

This book offers Anglo-Saxon students of the First World War a usefully original perspective

Max Hastings, Sunday Times

Alexander Watson's remarkable history of the first world war makes clear as never before how this unparalleled conflict impacted on and changed the societies of central Europe, particularly Germany and Austria-Hungary

PD Smith, the Guardian