The Locomotive of War

A highly original and compelling book, a wide-ranging and challenging interpretation by a superb historian. Clarke brilliantly shows how the moral imperatives of Anglo-American liberalism shaped the impact of total war in the West after 1945. In stark contrast to Trotsky's prediction of world revolution, major social advances under reformed capitalism were the result - that is, until regression began with the new inequalities that set in during the 1970s -- Ian Kershaw, author of 'To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949' Plausible and enormously engaging ... An old-fashioned kind of history, brimming with ideas and based on scrupulous research, and it is all the better for it ... Clarke is such an acute writer that almost every paragraph has something surprising to say. Perhaps above all, he has an unrivalled ability to leaven serious political analysis with gossipy anecdotal details -- Dominic Sandbrook Sunday Times The Locomotive of War exposes the lineaments of the liberal morality that twentieth-century Anglo-American decision-makers brought to the making of war. Clarke tracks the evolving relationships among Gladstone's trans-Atlantic descendants - from Keynes, Grey, Lloyd George and Wilson to Churchill and Roosevelt - illuminating the affinities, but also the tensions and divergences among them. Brilliant, forensic and sparkling with arresting vignettes, Clarke's reconstruction of the political economy of liberal warfare reinterprets the twentieth century and asks unsettling questions of the present -- Christopher Clark, author of 'The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914' It is a tribute to his protean personality, and to Clarke's diligent scholarship and elegant narration, that every aspect of his [Churchill's] life remains eternally fascinating Sunday Telegraph on Mr Churchill's Profession Fascinating, erudite and witty Guardian on Mr Churchill's Profession Clarke gives us the fullest account yet of Churchill's hair-raising attitude towards money ... A scholarly gem: polished and sparkling and a lasting contribution to our understanding of Churchill Literary Review on Mr Churchill's Profession Engrossing ... With effortless command of detail and pointed anecdote, Clarke tells the story through the biographies and interactions of leading members of a gilded elite on both sides of the Atlantic -- Ian Irvine Prospect