The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War, By Peter Englund

Englund lays out his perameters at the outset. This, he states, is a book not about how the Great War was but "what it was like."

What proceeds is far more radical, and emotional, than it sounds: lived history that makes no pretence at objectivity in which the reader follows 20 people, as disparate as a 12-year-old German schoolgirl and a Venezuelan cavalryman, from outbreak to end, tracing the small triumphs and quiet horrors of these extraordinary, ordinary people.