Amanda Laugesen, Furphies and Whizz-bangs: Anzac Slang from the Great War, South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2015. Did you know that a word as quintessentially Aussie as 'Aussie' was a product of the First World War? Well, you do now, because I just told you; and I know it because I just read it (among other things) in this book.

Diana Preston, A Higher Form of Killing: Six Weeks in World War I that Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare, New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015. Preston argues that the period in April-May 1915 was essentially where the era of weapons of mass destruction began, spanning as it did the first use of poison gas, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the first Zeppelin raid on London. I think she has a point; while I would place this in a slightly longer context of brutality and destruction (Belgium, Scarborough, etc), the conjunction of these events may well have marked a watershed in the mental shift to a total war, at least in English-speaking countries.

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