War and the State - The Transformation of British Government, 1914-1919

Kathleen Burk has achieved something few editors even try to do: she has produced, from the contributions of several different hands, a real book. It is a book, she tells us in her Introduction, of which she first felt the need as a postgraduate student: having identified the gap, she has now filled it. The idea of War and the State is to look beneath the familiar generalisations that the experience of war in various ways transformed the machinery of British government to examine in close detail precisely how it was transformed (and in some cases whether it was). Some of these generalisations survive the scrutiny of Dr Burk's seven specialists (most of whom – though she does not tell us so – have already published books on related subjects); others do not, or are subtly reformulated.