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Books

Gavrilo Princip – history's ultimate teenage tearaway

A review of The Trigger, by Tim Butcher. A triumphant and original account of the man who shot the Archduke

3 May 2014

9:00 AM

3 May 2014

9:00 AM

The Trigger Tim Butcher

Chatto, pp.308, £18.99, ISBN: 9780701187934

Amid the vast tonnage of recent books about the first world war this must be the most unusual — and one of the most interesting. The ‘Trigger’ of the title is Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old student dropout who shot the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand on a Sarajevo street corner on 28 June 1914 and began the chain of events that led to catastrophic war a few weeks later.

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