Adam LeBor
Report from Sarajevo
The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War
By Tim Butcher
Chatto & Windus 326pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
The Trigger is an evocative and ingenious take on the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. While the big guns among our historians, such as Max Hastings and Margaret MacMillan, battle over the political and economic causes of the conflict, Tim Butcher has chosen to focus on the individual. His book follows the footsteps of Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb radical who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 and so triggered the start of the war.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3
'Shopkeepers even cut out their names from shop paper bags and pasted them onto their books’ endpapers to feign wealth and gain cultural capital, as seen in a book owned by William Straw, a grocer.'
@laurenohagan91 on the Edwardian bookplate fashion.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/stepping-up-to-the-bookplate
Thank you to Timothy Ryback @TheIHJR - for his generous review of #Burningthebooks in this month's @Lit_Review - I LOVE the cover too!! Confess I have bought a print copy to frame ... Bonfires of Reason | Literary Review | Issue 489 https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonfires-of-reason