This is the best single detailed chronology of the leadup to WWI, by a large margin. Its main shortcoming is that Clark writes as if he can disentangle himself from the normative issues that surround WWI historiography, while insinuating without outright arguing that Serbian policy had a highly blameworthy role.

I'm not one to personally take strong sides on the WWI "war guilt" question, which after more than a century I find exhausting. It should be very clear after this much scholarship that both the most extreme "German war guilt" thesis and its revisionist opponent are implausible, and that however we precisely weight e.g. Germany's blank cheque to Austria-Hungary vs. Serbian policy, or Franco-Russian collaboration vs. German misperceptions of British intentions, that there's plenty of blame to go around and that a multicausal system failure occurred. This is in contrast to WWII, which is an extremely clear case of a war of conquest and aggression on the part of the Axis powers.

While the ongoing tendency to want to find "the culprit" for WWI arguably continues to detract from our understanding of how this disaster happened, Clark does himself no favors by pretending he is above the fray while very clearly implicitly taking a side in it.