Combines essays on the "personality dimension" in the 19th and 20th century international history, placing in a proper historical perspective the impact of individual diplomats, politicians and military strategists on foreign policy-making.

For historians centennial commemorations furnish an excellent heuristic tool for gauging late nineteenth and early twentieth-century attitudes towards the past and the present. Centenary celebrations helped to revive, perpetuate and reinforce public perceptions of historical events and people in collective memory. They were fairly infrequent before 1850, but increased in size and numbers by the end of the long nineteenth century, so much so that a 'cult of the centenary' had become established throughout the wider Western world around 1900. At one level, such events were ephemeral...