Bernie and I had never considered or even discussed the possibility of writing a global history of warfare, or even one that "merely" covered Eurasia and the Mediterranean world. Our first foray into this type of work was in 2014, when we pitched the idea to Routledge that would eventually become Warfare in Medieval Europe. That book took almost two years to write because of the need to synthesize a vast range of scholarship outside of our own areas of specialization.
You have to dig deep into Pierre Nora's dazzling career to find the slightest hint of anything unseemly: reports that "the English essayist Perry Anderson criticized for its 'consensual blandness'" without mentioning Anderson's leftist politics and the controversy sparked by Nora's public refusal to translate and publish The Age of Extremes , a highly acclaimed book written by English historian and Marxist Eric Hobsbawm.