
The English country house: Partying, hunting, shooting - pepys
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21698222-partying-hunting-shooting
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cpr
If you found this interesting at all, you have to sample the master of country
house humor, PG "Plum" Wodehouse.

(His most famous series being the Jeeves and Wooster books and stories.)

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falsedan
I don't understand why this was submitted.

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to3m
How likely do you think it is that a world war will break out?

What do you think people would have said in 1913? What about 1938? (Lest you
think this is some rhetorical dogwhistle shit: don't worry. It isn't. Just an
open question.)

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civilian
WW1 was truly unexpected-- all of the mutual alliances and it all being caused
by a random assassination.

WW2 was more expected.

And, idk, I don't have the benefit of hindsight, but I really doubt a world
war in which the US is involved will break out this decade. Like, with who?
Nukes & M.A.D. have still changed the equation and made a conventional-weapons
world war unreasonable.

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toyg
WW1 was fully expected, what was unexpected was the size and difficulty of it.
All involved countries had long-standing beef, but nobody thought they'd
really try to settle it at the same time and so cruelly. Treaties and
alliances are just pieces of paper (as Molotov-Ribbentropp demonstrated
later), what really triggered conflict was a belief that "the time had come"
to finally employ all those wonderful toys built up over 30 years of relative
peace and technological advance around Europe (a continent routinely ravaged
by frequent skirmishes up until then). They all thought they would have been
winners in a few months, ended up stuck in trenches with brutal casualties,
and conflict snowballed at the fringes.

