Lost and Found: A Study of the Pre-War Mindset: 1900-1914

'Lost and Found' is an attempt to understand why the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 was greeted with such enthusiasm and why the war was sustained with such vigour for so long. At the same time it embodies a critique of the mindset which gave rise to the war by revealing a world whose values set it so far apart from us as to make any genuine empathy between then and now almost impossible. In an effort to find some empathetic links with that lost world the author looks behind the 'certain certainties' and the 'tremendous sureties' which characterised that world. In so doing he embarks upon a journey of discovery which finally reveals that which was lost and that which truly links him, and perhaps others, to the past.