Max Hastings is a journalist, author and editor of right-wing newspapers. Keith you were asking for eminient historians to be respected by their peers, and Teribus stated that Hastings received good peer reviews in academic circles, but Hastings and also Nigel H. Jones sit outside the formal academic peer review system. They are not formally academic historians, they are amateurs in that they are paid to do something else. It is like describing the likes of Piers Corbyn and Benny Peiser as climate scientists, they each have an academic background but not in the subject that they make most of their statements about now. I have no background in history, and I have no real interest in what historians say about WWI unless there are revisionists who deny that millions died in the trenches. But I have heard nobody deny this, and therefore conclude that there was no justification for the sacrifice of all those lives, whatever historians might say about peripheral minutiae such as which bunch of inbreds occupies our throne.