Niall Ferguson is the man of the moment. In fact, so versatile an historian is Ferguson that he is the man for almost every moment. Crucially, he is always the perfect man for the moment just after the 9am news on Monday when Start the Week requires an expert at once timelessly authoritative and right on the news agenda.

Ferguson's latest book, The Ascent of Money, is the perfect recession primer: a comprehensive economic history ready for the moment when most of our inherited economic assumptions - like Gordon Brown's Golden Rules - have just become history. The arrival of the book is only the latest example of Ferguson's almost supernaturally prescient timing. He anticipated both the ambitious advance and the check of American global ambition with Empire and Colossus. And he anatomised the factors that underpinned the decline of the West and the rise of the East just two years ago in the The War of The World.

But there's one, rather older, book of Ferguson's that is particularly apposite reading this week. The Pity of War, his revisionist, polemical history of the First World War, is a suitable bedside companion for the week before the 90th anniversary of the Armistice. The book is not a conventional narrative history of the war. Rather it takes a variety of assumptions about the war (its justness, the horror of fighting for the private soldier) and exposed them to a vigorous, critical scorching.

Ferguson's ultimate conclusion is that the war was an error, that Britain would have been better off standing aside, that German victory would have simply given us an earlier version of the European Union, without the horrors of millions dead, without the loss of our maritime Empire, and with the Kaiser rather than Peter Mandelson as the most glamorous representative of the pan-European governing class.

Ferguson's case is designed to provoke. And I am less than sure that Wilhelmine domination of Europe would have been a bureaucratically benign affair. But it does seem increasingly clear to me that the Great War was a tragedy whose dimensions we still struggle to comprehend. In August 1914 it was possible to travel, and trade, freely across a Europe run, mostly, in a tolerant and liberal fashion. The ramshackle empires of the first decade of the last century may have offended nationalists and utopians of every stripe but they were delivering increased material prosperity and greater personal freedom at a steady rate. It took us nearly 80 years to recover from the shock of their demise. More than that, in so many areas of our intellectual and cultural life the Great War signalled a wrong turning.

Ferdinand Mount once argued, rightly to my mind, that the 20th century would have been happier had we “followed Gladstone, not Marx; William James rather than Freud; Arnold Bennett, not Virginia Woolf; Lutyens, not Le Corbusier”. But the turn towards Marxism, modernism and me-first-ism was a consequence of the shattering of the more gracious, settled, bourgeois world that prevailed before 1914. The collapse of parliamentary Liberalism, the crumbling of faith in what kept us civilised, the ebbing of confidence in old orders, all were casualties of the Great War. And we feel their loss to this day.

Far from immaculate

The thing about self-deprecation is that I'm not very good at it. A few weeks ago in this space I was trying to pay tribute to Alan Coren, and in the process emphasise how much I envied his brilliance. I referred to the time when I was Comment editor and Alan one of the columnists whom it was my job to edit. I wrote that acting as his editor was a bit like being Joseph after the Immaculate Conception - all I had to do was stand there while something miraculous was delivered.

And in so writing I emphasised just how very different my prose was from Alan's. For that simile was very far from being immaculately conceived. Joseph wasn't present at the Immaculate Conception. He was there at the Virgin Birth. It was Mary herself, the Blessed Virgin, who was Immaculately Conceived.

I am grateful to the many readers who, kindly, corrected me. As I am sure some readers will recall, I have, over the years, used the odd Biblical reference in my columns when complaining about the idiocies of the age. And now I find myself guilty of one of the greatest of them. Which just goes to prove that only he who is without sin should cast the first moan.

The futures market

I may not have the predictive powers of a Niall Ferguson, and I am in no danger of being mistaken for a Prophet, but I will now make three assertions about the future which I'd be prepared to put money on.

Sharpay will, in due course, come from nowhere to become a popular name in this country for newborn girls. The same thing will happen with Troy, for boys.

Choreography will become a respected career option for adolescent males uncertain about their place in the world. If you don't believe me, talk to friends who have children at primary school...

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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