Lusitania: Saga and Myth

Fifty years ago, I had a Sunday School teacher who, when a child, had been saved from the Lusitania disaster, in which his father had been one of the 1,198 victims. This was a tragedy on the scale of the Titanic, but has been much less studied, perhaps because it was soon eclipsed in the public consciousness by the ever‐mounting horrors of the Western Front. But the author is right to claim that it was a more significant event than the loss of the great White Star liner. Unlike that disaster, it had a perceptible effect on world history,...