Basket.

Nearly ninety years ago today, the greatest conflict then known to mankind officially ended. After over four years of slaughter on the fields and cities of Europe, World War I (technically, only the fighting on the Western Front, to be truthful) came to an end at 11am on 11 November 1918 - the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The end of the war was also the end of an era - Europe had been changed forever by the conflict. Four of its great empires, Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire, fell, and from the debris emerged new states, political unrest and civil war. France, although victorious, was irreparably damaged, losing 17% of her young male population in war casualties; her national spirit broken. The British Empire emerged seemingly strong, but in actual fact broke and breaking up; within less than two decades the fear of another such terrible conflagaration had these two victorious powers grovelling before Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. Russia was convulsed in her own bloody civil war, from which was to emerge the USSR that would dominate, ruthlessly, most of the rest of the century. Of the major combatants, only Japan emerged better off than she had been before the war.

The outbreak of war in 1914 had been the beginning of the end for the Long Nineteenth Century; the armistice of 1918 finally brought the curtain down.

By some coincidence, I this week finished Paul Johnson's sweeping Modern Times, in general a history of the Short Twentieth Century (to borrow from Hobsbawm), minus World War I. Unbelievably comprehensive, the book manages to deal with practically all major issues on all continents and major states between Versailles and the early 1980s. A section added later deals with the rest of the momentuous 1980s and the 1990s, including the fall of Communism throughout Europe, the Gulf War and the scientific revolution of genetic engineering. A very absorbing read and definitely one of the best history works I've ever gone through.

Now if I could only get myself to finish some Hobsbawm, who is undeniably brilliant but whose style of writing is something of an acquired taste.

I just love history more than ever.