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 Jaurès on the night the war began and an epoch ended.

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