‘1913: The World Beforethe Great War’, by Charles Emmerson

In May 1913 a British delegation visited the United States to discuss plans for celebrating 100 years of Anglo-American peace. At their final meeting in New York’s Plaza Hotel, the representatives of both sides had just agreed on a five-minute silence to be observed across the English-speaking world on 17 February 1915, when Professor Hugo Munsterberg of Harvard interrupted proceedings. Did the delegates realise, he wanted to know, that there was widespread belief that Britain and America were

getting together to join a war against Germany? Charles Peabody, a member of the New York committee, quietened him down.  Neither country was contemplating war, he said. Indeed, he continued, all nations could be part of a universal bond of brotherhood which would abolish it. Everybody clapped.

There will come a time when commissioning editors, trawling through history for a spare year to hang a book on, will be reduced to a choice between the 1970s and a couple of dodgy years in the 1340s, but if 1913 is anything to go by there is life in the old annual yet.