Peter Hart Audiobooks

The Great War at full scale, by a British military historian who works from the record

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Who is Peter Hart?

Peter Hart, born in 1955, is a British military historian. The job description is worth taking at face value: this is a writer whose working life has been given to the study of armed conflict, in the tradition of serious, evidence-led British military history rather than battlefield romance.

Military history is a crowded field in Britain, and it rewards exactly what the specialist brings – command of the sources, a feel for how events actually unfolded, and the judgement to separate myth from record. Hart writes from inside that discipline, and his subject in our catalogue is the largest one the field has to offer.

Peter Hart in audiobooks

The Great War is his history of the First World War, and the plainness of the title suits the approach: the war itself, treated at full scale, without gimmick. Long-form military history works unexpectedly well in audio – the format gives an enormous subject room to breathe, and a listener can absorb the sweep of it across a week of commutes in a way a shelf-bound volume rarely achieves. For UK listeners this remains the conflict closest to national memory, and a military historian’s steady guidance is the right way through it: serious listening for serious curiosity, and all the better for it.