History readers will be familiar with Margaret MacMillan's earlier masterpiece Peacemakers, which describes the four main players at the Versailles Treaty negotiations and how the many settlements in Europe and the Middle East were concluded. They will not be disappointed with her latest offering, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (Random House), on how the first World War started in the first place.

The long peace of the 1800s, after the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, had lulled European diplomats and politicians into a false sense of security. The war, she contends, should never have been allowed to happen, but it did.

MacMillan describes, with great scholarship, the many factors and personalities whose combined intersections led, inexorably, to the first World War. This is a fascinating must-read book for anyone who wants to understand the centenary of this event next August, and Ireland’s place within it.