The Locomotive of War

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A fresh and fascinating reappraisal of the first half of the twentieth century from one of our foremost historians '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 mass armies, certainly saw the locomotive power of war geared up to an unprecedented level. 0'The Locomotive of War' is a forensic and punctilious examination of both the interplay between key figures in the context of the unprecedented all-out wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 and the broader dynamics of history in this extraordinary period