3/5

Starts extremely strong with its description of the end of the war but, like the peace conference of 1919, this meanders as it progresses and lands in a rather unsettled state. Like most books about Versailles there is a backwards logic trying to explain the collapse of the treaty in the following decades. This makes it harder to take in the world these figures lived in as its almost impossible to imagine 1919 without jumping in one’s mind to the events of 1929, 1933 and 1939. The book is also not chronological, this can be a strength by focusing on individual issues like the Ottoman Empire or the new states of Eastern Europe. It also is a weakness as its harder to get a sense for the negotiations as a whole and how each figure moved as they progressed as we are almost always jumping back in time with each chapter.