I first read A. J. P. Taylor’s The First World War: An Illustrated History a long time ago, although for some reason I had never actually owned a copy. That small omission was recently corrected when I came across a copy sitting in a thrift shop. Given my inability to leave an interesting military history book sitting forlornly on a second hand shelf, it inevitably came home with me. Having bought it, I decided that after all these years it deserved another read.

Originally published by Hamish Hamilton in 1963, The First World War is now more than sixty years old, which raises an obvious question. Is there any point in reading Taylor when First World War scholarship has advanced enormously since he wrote it? My answer after returning to the book is definitely yes, although perhaps not always for the same reasons that I would have recommended it when I first encountered it. The original edition ran to 224 pages, while the familiar Penguin edition expanded to 296 pages, and the book combines Taylor’s narrative with a very substantial collection of photographs and maps.

Taylor attempts something that is considerably harder than it looks. He compresses the enormous political and military complexity of the First World War into a relatively short and readable narrative without reducing the whole thing to a simple chronology of battles. Sarajevo, the German advance into France, the Marne, Gallipoli, the Eastern Front, the Balkans, the naval war, the Russian Revolution and the great offensives of 1918 all find their place, before the narrative moves into the peace settlement and the altered European order that emerged from the conflict.

The great strength remains Taylor himself. Whatever one thinks about some of his interpretations, the man could write history. He had that increasingly rare ability to explain a complicated event in a few paragraphs and then move on without leaving the reader completely bewildered. His prose is economical, confident and frequently sharp, while his interest lies much more in explaining why events occurred than in providing detailed descriptions of individual actions. This is principally a history of strategy, politics and command rather than a battlefield history.

That approach also produces one of the book’s weaknesses. Taylor is frequently severe in his treatment of political and military leaders, and the generals in particular emerge rather badly. The interpretation reflects an older tradition of First World War historiography in which unsuccessful offensives, enormous casualties and apparent strategic blindness were often attributed heavily to failures of senior command. Contemporary scholarship has complicated that picture considerably by paying much greater attention to technological limitations, communications, logistics, doctrine, institutional learning and the extraordinarily difficult tactical problems created by modern industrial warfare.

Taylor therefore needs to be read today as Taylor, rather than as the final word on the First World War. That is hardly a criticism unique to this book. Any general history written in 1963 is going to reflect the scholarship and historical debates of its period. Indeed, this was one of the things I found particularly interesting on returning to it after so many years. I was not simply rereading a history of the First World War. I was also reading an example of how the war was interpreted by one of Britain’s most influential historians during the middle of the twentieth century.

There is also something else that distinguishes this book from many later general histories: the illustrations really matter. They are not simply photographs dropped into the book to break up large slabs of text. More than 220 photographs were incorporated into the work, together with maps, and the selection was intended to form part of the historical argument rather than merely decorate it. Someone involved in assembling the original edition later recalled that Taylor had a particularly good eye for photographs that were unusual or revealing rather than simply conventional portraits of important men.

That makes the description An Illustrated History important. The photographs repeatedly return the reader from grand strategy to the people caught up in it. Generals, politicians and armies might dominate the written narrative, but the images provide another level to the story. Soldiers, civilians, prisoners, ruined landscapes and the machinery of industrial warfare give the book a human dimension that Taylor’s deliberately economical prose sometimes lacks.

There are inevitably other areas where the book now shows its age. Social and cultural approaches to the war have developed enormously since the early 1960s, as has scholarship concerning ordinary soldiers, colonial troops, gender, memory, medicine, trauma and the experiences of civilian populations. A reader looking for those perspectives will need to go elsewhere. Likewise, anyone wanting detailed operational analysis of the Somme, Verdun, Gallipoli or the campaigns of 1918 will find Taylor moving on long before a modern military historian would have finished discussing them.

Yet criticising the book because it does not contain everything written about the First World War during the subsequent sixty years rather misses the point. Taylor was writing a concise general history, and judged as such it remains remarkably effective. He establishes the strategic problems, identifies the principal personalities, explains the major campaigns and keeps an extraordinarily complicated conflict moving forward. There are very few places where the narrative becomes bogged down, something that cannot be said about every modern general history of the war.

Returning to the book after such a long interval also reminded me why Taylor became such a prominent popular historian. You may disagree with him, occasionally quite strongly, but you are rarely bored by him. There is an argument running through the narrative and a historian prepared to make judgements rather than simply present a collection of facts. Some of those judgements have not survived subsequent scholarship particularly well, but they still force the reader to think about why the war developed as it did.

Would I recommend The First World War today? Certainly, but with qualifications. I would not recommend it as the only book someone should read on the First World War, nor would I treat all of Taylor’s conclusions as representing current historical thinking. As an introduction it remains clear and remarkably readable, while for anyone already familiar with the war it offers the additional pleasure of encountering Taylor’s distinctive interpretation and considering how First World War historiography has changed since the 1960s.

Perhaps that is why finding this particular book in a thrift shop was such a pleasant surprise. I went home with a book I had read many years ago but somehow never added to my shelves, and rereading it turned out to be more interesting than simply revisiting an old favourite. The First World War has not changed since Taylor wrote about it, but the way historians understand it certainly has. Reading Taylor again makes that very clear.

More than sixty years after its original publication, The First World War: An Illustrated History is no longer the book I would reach for to discover the latest thinking about the Great War. It remains, however, a classic, and an intelligent, provocative and immensely readable account written by a historian who knew how to tell a complicated story without requiring three volumes to do it.

And for the price of a thrift shop find, I certainly cannot complain.