In this major literary event, Robert K Massie, author of the international bestseller 'Nicholas And Alexandra' and the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Peter The Great', has written a richly textured and gripping chronicle of the personal and national rivalries that led to the twentieth century's first great arms race.
With the biographer's rare genius for expressing the essence of extraordinary lives, Massie brings to life a crowd of glittering figures: the single-minded Admiral von Tirpitz; the young, ambitious Winston Churchill; the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bemhard von Bulow; Britain's greatest twentieth-century Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey; and Jacky Fisher, the eccentric admiral who revolutionized the British Navy and brought forth for the first true battleship, HMS "Dreadnought".
Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstanding, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in this powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, this is history at its most riveting.
