"Not for me. Just a long story about bad things happening to a boy. Nice writing though. Would recommend people read David Copperfield though if they liked the general scope, that's class"

"The author (born 1905) went to Eton, our most elitist poshest public school (which in Britain means private school, just our little joke) and there he was pals with Evelyn Waugh (born 1903) . Maybe there was a competition between the two but anyways Henry won - his first novel Blindness was published in 1926 and Evelyn had to wait two whole more years to publish his first novel. They were 21 and 25 years old. Such precocious, ghastly rich boys! Who did they think they were?

Alas, both Blindness and Decline and Fall are excellent and worth reading! It’s just too bad. (Patrick Hamilton, born 1904, one of my favourites, published his first novel in 1926, aged 22. But he wasn’t posh. In comparison, Sally Rooney published her first novel in 1991 when she was an elderly 26.)

Blindness is pretty wonderful. A rich kid is travelling in a train, some nasty urchin flings a big stone at the train window, and tragedy strikes, the broken glass blinds the rich kid. There follows some stiff upper lip suffering, some upper class comedy, two or three excellent characters you would like to have seen more of, and some dazzling appreciation of leaves and cats and roses and weather and so forth.

Henry Green wrote 8 more novels, each pretty weird but weird in different ways, including Living which came out 3 years after this one and which I gave 5 stars to."

"Fantastic narrative history building up to the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. Avoids 5 stars for two reasons, the narrative dragged in the middle with too much detail on the Balkan conflicts of the early Twentieth Century, and I felt it lacked a high-altitude view of the global balance of power that also included the USA, Ottoman Empire, and Japan.

The book builds up to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand (should have put a spoiler warning if you were unsure what happened), which serves as the mid-point of the narrative. Before that, there is an assessment of each of the 6 principle players (Serbia, Austria-Hungary, Russian, Germany, France, UK), their political systems, the big characters and how their alliances worked.

Following the assassination, the book goes day-by-day, building up to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, and the ensuring madness that leads to catastrophe, which is where the book is honestly almost unputdownable, which is saying something for a 700-page history tome.

It is tragic to read how each of the countries sees conflict as effectively inevitable as the crisis progresses, refusing to countenance how a slight diplomatic embarrassment could be preferable to a war with millions of casualties. Truly, leaders without the slightest inclination of how it will impact the average citizen in their countries. You will be incredibly frustrated reading it, at the hubris and ineptitude of many of the senior politicians as the European states slide slowly towards war.

4/5"