The fateful quarter century leading up to World War I was a time when the world of privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of protest was ';heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.' The age was the climax of a century of the most accelerated rate of change to that point in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny.Barbara Tuchman brings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy; the anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev's Russian Ballet and Stravinsky's music; the Dreyfus Affair; two peace conferences in the Hague; and, finally, the youth, ideals, enthusiasm, and tragedy of socialism, epitomized by the death of heroic Jean Jaures on the night the war began and an epoch ended.