Up close and personal: voices from the Great War, week by week

In the summer of 2014, David Hargreaves was invited by Robert Cottrell, the editor of The Browser, to write a series of articles shadowing, week by week, the course of the first world war. Over the next four years Hargreaves and his researcher and co-author, Margaret-Louise O’Keeffe, brought these out online, and they have now been published, originally by subscription, in a set of four volumes that runs in all to a monumental 2,200 pages.

It is one thing to have dreamed up the project, it’s another to have carried it off with the collaborative skill and commitment on show here. It is impressive enough that over those years they never missed a single deadline; but what seems every bit as remarkable is the emotional stamina that saw them return, week in, week out, to a war in which success could be measured in yards, and lives expended with a profligacy that beggars belief.