Crucible

Ricochets the reader around the globe, providing a visceral sense of the power and pace of the whirlwind that in the wake the Great War birthed the world as we know it. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait, brilliantly curated and elegantly executed, of a world on the cusp of modernity

Wade Davis, author of Into the Silence

Brings this extraordinary time to life with great vividness by evoking key moments from the daily lives of a dazzling variety of people

Adam Hochschild

Emmerson skilfully tells the story of this lingering end to the Great War and Europe’s subsequent and dramatic transformation

History of War

An ambitious, original, seductive and important work

Robert Gildea

A remarkable book… An amazingly audacious and completely innovative way of writing history … immediate and gripping

William Boyd

Emmerson… vividly bring[s] out…the sheer unpredictability of events, the role of personality and pure chance…that lay behind the tidier narrative which…we label ‘history’

David Crane, Literary Review

In its intimate details and its grand overviews, Crucible is a compelling patchwork depiction of an era

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Times Literary Supplement

The fragmented form of Crucible matches its content… Though never formless, Emmerson’s book dramatises that variegated chaos, dodging to and fro across the globe and veering between tragedy and farce, high politics and low culture

Peter Conrad, Observer

Writing in the present tense, the author hops and skips around the capitals of Europe…giving us short, erudite and often colourful snatches of the lives of a series of individuals which when taken together describe the crucible in which the world is changed

Wynn Weldon, Spectator

Crucible… somehow metastasises into one’s consciousness… The reader is…thrown raw, wet entrails and left to divine them. It’s unsettling, entertaining, aggravating and intriguing

Gerard DeGroot, The Times