Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

Looks at siege warfare employed by Prussia against fortifications in France during the Franco-Prussian War.

The Old Wives’ Tale, considered to be one of Bennett’s finest works, begins in the 1860s, in the industrial “Five Towns” of the English Midlands, where he set many of his partially-autobiographical stories. The novel follows the prosperous Baines family, who live above the successful clothing shop they own in the town of Bursley (based on Burslem, in Staffordshire). Even when the two Baines daughters were still young, their characters are already formed. Sophia has “youth, beauty, and rank in her favour,” while Constance is “foolishly good-natured,” with benevolence that is “eternally rising up and overpowering her reason.” Their paths diverge quickly. While still in her teens, the headstrong Sophia elopes with a traveling salesman, leaving England’s provinces for Paris. Constance, who later marries the head employee at the store, hardly ever leaves their town—or even the square where their shop is located. As the novelist J. B. Priestley observed, this gently ironic and sprawling novel sets its “two suffering heroines” against “three conquering heroes, Time, Mutability, and Death.”

'Superb on the human consequences of war, ravishing in its evocations of wartime life' The Times 'Compassionate and thought-provoking history' Daily Telegraph Less than a month after it marched into France in summer 1870, the Prussian army had devastated its opponents, captured Napoleon III and wrecked all assumptions about Europe's pecking order. Other countries looked on in helpless amazement. Pushing aside further French resistance, a new German Empire was proclaimed (as a deliberate humiliation) in the Palace of Versailles, leaving the French to face civil war in Paris, reparations and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. Bismarck's War tells the story of one of the most shocking reversals of fortune in modern European history. The culmination of a globally violent decade, the Franco-Prussian War was deliberately engineered by Bismarck, both to destroy French power and to unite Germany. It could not have worked better, but it also had lurking inside it the poisonous seeds of all the disasters that would ravage the twentieth century. Drawing on a remarkable variety of sources, Chrastil's book explores the military, technological, political and social events of the war, its human cost and the way that the sheer ferocity of war, however successful, has profound consequences for both victors and victims.