Paris 1919

I could not put this book down. It proves that war and peace have lasting and momentous ramifications. Deeply researched and elegantly detailed, it establishes the undeniable truth that we still live among the war-torn shadows of the First World War and its fraudulent peace—the current implications of the Paris Peace Conference and the ensuing Treaty of Versailles are simply staggering.

Until I read this book, I had thought of the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference in yawn-inducing terms of maps and endless documents. But MacMillan gave me a new angle of vision, with her brilliant descriptions of the statesmen’s personalities, the corridor conspiracies, the exotic characters on the conference’s fringes, and the high-handed manner in which a tiny clique of national leaders imposed unrealistic solutions.

I finally understood why World War I was not the “war to end all wars,” as the peacemakers hoped, but only a prelude to World War II and many of the conflicts still raging today.

The complicated business of tidying up after the defeat of the Central Powers and the attempt to put in place a lasting peace is nowhere better covered than in this book. It performs the far from easy feat of explaining the myriad conflicting interests with a detached understanding, which helps one understand the power of the forces unleashed by the war and just how insoluble were the problems these had created.