You might want to remove that errant 1 at the beginning. I know you're a thousand years old and the years must blend together sometimes, so it's understandable.

These sound like good reading. Your comparison to Massie piqued my interest — you once recommended his Peter the Great biography to me, and it's one of the best narrative histories I've read so far. I already have other books I need to read that deal in whole or in part with the First World War (Churchill's first world war series and a work by William Shirer about the fall of France that deals with the first war and how it contributed to the quick loss of the second), and I've read about the horror and incompetence elsewhere (the first volume of William Manchester's Churchill biography), but the first book in particular that you described, about pre-war Europe, sounds like the sort of thing I would enjoy. I'll have to look it up.