The Locomotive of War
Book description
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2017 'War, comrades,' declared Trotsky, 'is a great locomotive of history.' He was thought to be acknowledging the opportunity the First World War had offered the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia in 1917. Twentieth-century warfare, based on new technologies and…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Locomotive of War as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
The motivation for this book is the idea that it was liberals who bore much of the responsibility for the First World War and its aftermath.
Using a metaphor inspired by Trotsky’s famous quotation about war being the locomotive of history, Peter Clarke weaves together the careers of five of those liberals: two American Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt; two British Prime Ministers, David Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill; and the economist, Maynard Keynes.
It might seem odd to bracket an economist with such eminent world leaders, but Clarke makes a powerful case that the careers of all five…
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