Adam Hochschild

To End All Wars is a brilliant new work of history following a group of characters connected in various ways — blood ties, close friendships, or personal enmities — and shows how the war exposed the divisions between them.

They include the brother and sister whose views on the war could not have been more diametrically opposed – he a career soldier, she a committed pacifist; the politician whose job was to send young men who refused conscription to prison, yet whose godson was one of those young men; and the suffragette sisters, one of whom passionately supported the war and one of whom was equally passionately opposed to it.

Through these divided families, Hochschild paints a vivid picture of Britain poised between the optimism of the Victorian era and the era of Auschwitz and the Gulag – a divided country, fractured by the seismic upheaval of the Great War and its aftermath.