Hello and welcome history friends, patrons, patrons all, to our July crisis, Q&A.

Over the last year or more, our new July crisis series has dominated our attention at WDF Towers.

Your response to the series has been in the main.

Fantastic and it's been great to see so much interest in such a fascinating topic and era of history.

Of course, for us, the July crisis is old ground. I have looked at it before

as early as 2013 for our First World War series, and then in 2014 for the July Crisis Anniversary

Project. In that time, though, my knowledge has grown, my opinions have changed, my research

skills have improved, and hopefully your

understanding of the greatest failure in diplomacy has improved with it. But as much as we have

covered, there is always more to learn, and there may be parts of the story which you feel

deserve more attention. With that in mind, I very bravely asked for your questions

for this final episode of the July crisis, for the foreseeable future at least, and, well,

you delivered, as you could probably tell for the length of this episode. The questions you sent me

very dramatically, from a focus on certain powers, to more

technical queries, to insights into my own thinking process. I had a great time answering them,

as best as I can, but if it wasn't obvious yet, this won't be one of those heavily referenced

types of episodes. I'm instead going to stand on the bank of work already done

and be as informative but also as casual as possible. The idea is that we end this series as we

started it, with an army of loyal listeners eager to hear more. If you haven't listened to my

State of the Podcast Add address episode from last week,

you may be unaware that a lot of things are changing in when diplomacy fails in the future.

This includes the strong possibility that I may be going away for a while to tend to my new job and to prepare for the arrival of my son. I really appreciate your congratulations and well wishes. Trust me, nobody is more

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