Status Updates From I sonnambuli: Come l'Europa...

These pre-War European diplomats were really quite something else. All of them opinionated and full of themselves, pursuing personal policies rather than those of their respective governments. No bureaucratic banality of evil here but a vainglorious theatre of egos, where the fate of empires often hung on personal grudges and preconceptions.

always remarkable wading through the deep and muddy waters of well-presented history. still dealing with serbia, of course, the epicentre, but to look at the rest of the book and know that it will cover russia, britain, austria, etc. with the same depth is vertiginous & hammers home the "rube goldberg" feeling of ww1