Statesman of Europe

‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ The words of Sir Edward Grey, looking out from the windows of the Foreign Office in early August 1914, are amongst the most famous in European history, and encapsulate the impending end of the 19th-century world. ‘Statesman of Europe’ describes the three decades before the First World War through the prism of his biography, which is based almost entirely on archival sources and presents a detailed account of the main domestic and international events, and of the main personalities of the era.