SOURCE: “Thinking the Unthinkable,” in The New Yorker, April 12, 1999, pp. 43-6, 48-50.

In the following essay, Boynton analyzes the critical reaction to The Pity of War and provides an overview of Ferguson's academic career and historical writings.

In 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the “war to end all wars” came to an end. Every November since 1919, the people of Great Britain have observed two minutes of silence to mark the moment when the guns on the Western Front fell quiet. For the eightieth anniversary of the Armistice, last year, the Royal Family, political leaders, and the Bishop of London gathered on Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph in Whitehall to honor the British soldiers who perished in the conflict.

That week, some of Britain’s most distinguished historians and elder statesmen assembled at the Royal Geographic Society, in London, to hear a...