With the release of Richard Ned Lebow’s counterfactual history, Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Without World War I, readers would be forgiven for thinking that little more – given recent works by Max Hastings, Kate Adie, Jeremy Paxman, Margaret MacMillan and Nigel Jones, to name but five – needed to be said on the First World War. Histories of the years 1914-18 have been pouring off the presses in anticipation of the coming-centenary and the buckling of bookstore shelves is evident for all to see. Yet the plethora of publications has been largely predictable, leaving a large gap to be filled – until now, that is. I say this because David Reynolds, author of the critically-acclaimed In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, has penned The Long Shadow: The Great War in the Twentieth Century, which adequately fills the historiographical hole. ‘[M]ore interested in the canon than the cannon,’ to borrow reviewer Alex Danchev’s phrase, the Cambridge don looks beyond Tommies in the trenches to assess how global events in that stormy century – principally 1939-45, 1947-89 and 1991-2013 – formed and reformed our viewpoints to 1914-18. Divided into two parts, The Long Shadow is sure to divide opinion since it’s comprised of one good part and one not-so-good, hence my use of the word ‘adequately’. Let’s first deal with the latter before turning to the former. Believing they’d just lived through a “war to end all wars”, Reynolds reminds readers, contemporaries perceived the 1920s and 1930s to be the “post-war” years and not, as those who survived a second conflagration less than a quarter of a century later saw it, the “inter-war” period. One of the chief aims of Part One, entitled Legacies, is to illuminate why the shadow of the Great War was kept at bay in Britain while its legacy cast shadows over continental belligerents. And yet, alas, Reynolds fails to convince notwithstanding the obvious reason why it didn’t overshadow Britain’s body-politic: she was victorious (Pax Britannica reaching its peak post-1918) and the robust two-party system remained in place. Worst still, the author’s six thematic chapters – examining such notions as nationalism and capitalism – are so rich a serving that some palates will require a second serving in order to digest the first course. The same can’t be said for pithy Part Two, entitled Refractions, however, which ensures that The Long Shadow is a feast worthy of tucking into – and not by military specialists alone. Drawing upon a variety of historical sub-disciplines to analyse the refracted light through varied countries and the prisms of hot and (post-)cold wars, Reynolds’ illustrated tome is a must-have for cultural historians studying the twentieth century. A good, not great, narration of the narratives of the Great War.