Outstanding among them was Max Hastings’ Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War in 1914 (William Collins, RRP £30, Telegraph price £26). As with his recent books on the Second World War, Hastings adopts a cosmopolitan approach in which Britain takes her proper place as just one among the combatant nations – and numerically a very small player at that. Ranging across the war’s many theatres, from Russia and Prussia to the Balkans and the Vosges, as well as the more familiar Flanders, Hastings presents individual tragedies alongside the grand strategy in one overarching whole. And, in typically robust style, he gives short shrift both to what he sees as the skewed “poets’ view” of the war as unmitigated futility, and to pro-German revisionists seeking to clear Berlin of blame for starting the conflict.