Just arrived in the mail this very moment, my contributor’s copy of 28 June: Sarajevo 1914-Versailles 1919 — The War and Peace that Made the Modern World, edited by Alan Sharp. It’s a country by country analysis of the outbreak and end of World War One, largely by many of the authors who wrote books in the Makers of the Modern World series. As the biographer of both Wellington Koo and Prince Saionji, the youngest and eldest diplomats to make a splash at the Paris Peace Conference, I have two chapters in this collection, “The Chance of a Millennium” about Japan’s imperial ambitions, and “Labourers in Place of Soldiers” about the 140,000 Chinese coolies who did the laundry, fixed the roads and, yes, dug those famous trenches.