Reviews

'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.', Frank McLynn, .'Massie tells the story with controlled energy and attention to detail, especially human detail. It ahs not been told so well before.', Literary Review .'He can take an enormous canvas and fill every inch with action and description.', Sunday Times .'He has the supreme gift of making history live in simple, readable language.', Observer .'This is a book you are bound to enjoy. It is a chronicle of the Anglo-German naval rivalry placed against the broader background of the personal and national clashes that led to the Great War. 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