‘Select arresting quotes. Let your characters speak if the evidence is there,’ A.J.P. Taylor told his Oxford history students. In his own best-selling The First World War: An Illustrated History, struggling to convey something of the enormity of the disaster of the third battle of Ypres, Taylor wrote: ‘On 8 November Haig’s Chief-of-Staff visited the fighting zone for the first time. As his car struggled through the mud, he burst into tears and cried: “Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?” His companion replied: “It’s worse further up.”’