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Tim Butcher

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War

Hay Festival 2014, 

On a summer morning in Sarajevo a hundred years ago, a teenage assassin named Gavrilo Princip fired not just the opening shots of the First World War but the starting gun for modern history, when he killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Yet the events Princip triggered were so monumental that his own story has been largely overlooked, his role garbled and motivations misrepresented. Chaired by Liz Thomson.