The Last of Old Europe: A Grand Tour With A. J. P. Taylor.

This book of photos, with an interesting essay by A.J.P. Taylor, captures Europe before the First World War, an age of technical and social advances. New technologies - railways, the telegraph - shortened the distance between peoples and brought news instantly from everywhere. However, it was still an age dominated by monarchs and empires and nobility - even in industrialised Britain, the biggest employer was domestic service. For the better-off, it was a comfortable, cosy, confident world, with just the occasional rumbling of discontent from the lower orders (and, in the UK, from Ireland). The whole edifice would come crashing down in 1914, and the Europe that emerged from the wreckage would never be the same. This marvellous book shows what it was like back in those innocent times before the lights went out.

I've noticed that, in the year of the centenary of the start of the war that forever changed the world, that destroyed four empires and mortally wounded a fifth, that brought the isolation-tending USA to the forefront of the world scene and which set the scene for the even greater conflagration 25 years later, a lot of books are appearing, depicting the world that disappeared. Out of curiosity, I went looking to see whether this book, which I bought years ago in a sale, still existed - it does.It is a marvellous depiction of the world that was about to vanish, a world of certainty, where people knew their place, where new technologies were bringing the world closer together that ever before, and where, it was thought, that great wars would no longer be fought, because reasonable men could reason. A.J.P Taylor's introduction to the photos (because it is a book completely composed of contemporary photos) is typically sharp and observant.When I wrote this, a second-hand one was being offered at an utterly outrageous price, but reasonably-priced one is definitely worthwhile.