Vladimir Dedijer’s long-neglected The Road to Sarajevo remains one of the finest guides to the assassination that changed the course of the twentieth century. Later this month, on July 28th, the world will quietly pass the 112th anniversary of one of history’s defining moments. On that day in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within days, Europe’s elaborate alliance system would lurch into motion. By August, the Continent, which had largely been at peace for nearl

250 years after its publication, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the supreme meditation on the mortality of civilisations. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) In the 1980s, German historian Alexander Demandt attempted to catalogue every explanation ever proposed for the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. In ‘Der Fall Roms’ (1984), Demandt detailed more than two hundred causes that led to Rome’s collapse, from the eminently plausible to the positive