"Victory 1918 recounts the myriad of tragic blunders and the unprecedented, unfathomable bloodshed that was World War I. When an armistice was finally signed in the forest of Compiegne outside of Paris, the Great War had shuttered to an end, but not before it had been fought on three continents. Alan Palmer, while recounting the fruitless, static trench warfare of the western front, shifts the focus away from the west and explores the significance...

Offers a provocative view of the Empire's decline from the failure to take Vienna in 1683 to the abolition of the Sultanate by Mustafa Kemal (Attaturk) in 1922 during a revolutionary upsurge in Turkish national pride. Emphasizes recurring problems: competition between religious and secular authority; the acceptance or rejection of Western ideas; and the strength or weakness of successive Sultans.

"Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg (1 April 1815? 30 July 1898), simply known as Otto von Bismarck, was a conservative German statesman who dominated European affairs from the 1860s to his dismissal in 1890 by Emperor Wilhelm II. In 1871, after a series of short victorious wars, he unified most of the German states (whilst excluding some, most notably Austria) into a powerful German Empire under Prussian leadership. This created...