A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

British paratroopers make a combat jump in Operation Market Garden. Photo Credit: Imperial War Museum  Someone on Quora asks: Was World War II a continuation of World War I? In many ways, yes. In fact, I’ve read (in Antony Beevor’s 2012 one-volume history,  The Second World War,  I believe it was) that some historians consider the European war of 1939–1945 to be the conclusion of a single European conflict that began in August of 1914 and, after a two-decade intermission in which both sides rearmed and reconsidered their strategies, resumed in September of 1939, ending only with the destruction of Germany and the old European world order and the rise of the Soviet Union and the United States as the dominant superpowers. There are even convincing theses floating out there that suggest that if you add the Cold War to the mix, you can connect most of the chaos and misery of the 20th Century to the yin-and-yang struggle between the Left and the Right that beg...

Dust jacket design: Eric White. © 2013 Alfred A. Knopf On September 24, 2013, 99 years and one day after Japan – in an ironic historical twist – declared war on her future Axis partner Germany, Alfred A. Knopf published Sir Max Hastings' Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War, the U.S. edition of the esteemed British historian's account of World War One's first five months. Published in Britain as Catastrophe, the book examines the diplomatic, military, and human errors in judgment that led to the outbreak of Europe in the summer of 1914 and set in motion the chain of events that caused future horrors in the 20th Century and beyond. In this nearly 700-page volume, Hastings focuses exclusively on the conflict – known then by most people as "the Great War," although some prescient German writers called it der Weltkrieg: "the World War" – in the Eastern and Western Fronts in Europe. (In his introduction, Hastings writes, "Hew Strachan, in the first...