The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War by Nick Lloyd

This event marks the publication of the definitive history of the Eastern Front in the First World War from the acclaimed military historian and author of Passchendaele and The Western Front. In the second volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Professor Nick Lloyd tells the story for the first time of what Winston Churchill once called the 'unknown war': the vast conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that brought about the collapse of three empires. Through intimate eyewitness reports, diary entries and memoirs - many of which have never been translated into English before - Lloyd reconstructs the full story of a war that began in the Balkans as a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and which sucked in Russia, Germany and Italy, right through to the final collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. The Eastern Front paints a vivid and authoritative picture of a conflict that shook the world, and that remains central to understanding the tragic, blood-soaked trajectory of the entire twentieth century, including the current war in Ukraine.

Speaker and Author: Nick Lloyd is Professor of Modern Warfare at King's College London. He is Director of Education in the Defence Studies Department and the author of The Western Front (2021), which is the first volume in a ground-breaking narrative history of the First World War.

Chair: Jonathan Fennell is Professor of the History of War and Society at King's College London. He is Director of Research in the Defence Studies Department and Co-Director of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War. He is the author of the award-winning Fighting the People's War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (2019).