It’s clear from Zweig’s book that continental civilisation before 1914 had, in many ways, reached a level that it has yet to regain nearly a century later. The approved version these days is that war brought huge technological and social advance (the then French Ambassador to London, Paul Cambon, said after 1918 that Britain had undergone an actual revolution during the war, and this was certainly just as true in the 1939-45 war). But aren’t we inclined to see the ‘liberation’ of women from ‘domestic drudgery’ 9and their transfer to industrial and commercial drudgery)) as an unalloyed good, just as we tend to view universal suffrage as automatically wonderful, and the much-increased level of state intervention in daily life as broadly beneficial.

But were they? Did we take the right turning? Few blessings are unmixed, most come with curses. And the price we paid, in lives and health, for these revolutions, was colossal. Was it worth it?