Adrian Gregory's "The Last Great War"

Adrian Gregory is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, and reported the following:

Page 99 is largely about voluntary activity at a local level during the war in Liverpool and Bristol - this does reflect two important themes of the book- the need to look at the impact of the war in the locality and the mobilization of civil society to support the war effort. It also illustrates the way in which the volunteering of soldiers stimulated civilian volunteering on behalf of soldiers- a crucial point to set against the mythology of the alienated soldier and the indifferent civilian. It also has the statistic that 32,450 servicemen were entertained at the Bristol Zoo and 50,000 at the museum - I am always a sucker for numbers to make a point and do it a lot in the book.

Read an excerpt from The Last Great War and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue