The Sleepwalkers

Formidable ... one of the most impressive and stimulating studies of the period ever published

Max Hastings, Sunday Times

Easily the best book ever written on the subject ... A work of rare beauty that combines meticulous research with sensitive analysis and elegant prose. The enormous weight of its quality inspires amazement and awe ... Academics should take note: Good history can still be a good story

Washington Post

A lovingly researched work of the highest scholarship. It is hard to believe we will ever see a better narrative of what was perhaps the biggest collective blunder in the history of international relations

Niall Ferguson

[Reading The Sleepwalkers], it is as if a light had been turned on a half-darkened stage of shadowy characters cursing among themselves without reason ... [Clark] demolishes the standard view ... The brilliance of Clark's far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue ... In conception, steely scholarship and piercing insights, his book is a masterpiece

Harold Evans, New York Times Book Review

Impeccably researched, provocatively argued and elegantly written ... a model of scholarship

Sunday Times Books of the Year

Superb ... effectively consigns the old historical consensus to the bin ... It's not often that one has the privilege of reading a book that reforges our understanding of one of the seminal events of world history

Mail Online

A monumental new volume ... Revelatory, even revolutionary ... Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable

Boston Globe

Superb ... One of the great mysteries of history is how Europe's great powers could have stumbled into World War I ... This is the single best book I have read on this important topic

Fareed Zakaria

A meticulously researched, superbly organized, and handsomely written account

Military History

Clark is a masterly historian ... His account vividly reconstructs key decision points while deftly sketching the context driving them ... A magisterial work

Wall Street Journal

This compelling examination of the causes of World War I deserves to become the new standard one-volume account of that contentious subject

Foreign Affairs

A brilliant contribution

Times Higher Education

Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject ... He provides vivid portraits of leading figures ... [He] also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war

Irish Times

In recent decades, many analysts had tended to put most blame for the disaster [of the First World War] on Germany. Clark strongly renews an older interpretation which sees the statesmen of many countries as blundering blindly together into war

Stephen Howe, Independent BOOKS OF THE YEAR