Christopher Clark

Christopher Clark is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. Revolutionary Spring, about 1848, is out now.

Letter

Who started it?

29 August 2013

Christopher Clark writes: I thank Norman Frink for his insightful and generous comments about the review and about my book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. But I don’t accept that there is anything ‘sly’ about my handling of the evidence for German war guilt. The book engages the case for German war guilt head-on, proposing in place of the primary culprit model a polycentric...

Kings Grew Pale: Rethinking 1848

Neal Ascherson, 1 June 2023

The revolution was significantly different in each country it visited. The fearsome events unfolding in Vienna can’t be understood without taking into account the simultaneous eruptions in Hungary....

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Some saw the collapse of the German Empire as a decisive and traumatic break in the historical continuity of the state. Nothing, in Christopher Clark’s view, more profoundly exemplified this revolt against...

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The weakness and unreliability of the alliances, and the lack of certainty about who would be on whose side, exacerbated the crisis of summer 1914.

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Black Legends: Prussia

David Blackbourn, 16 November 2006

Too much history can be bad for you. ‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ – that was Marx’s famous comment on...

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