'Aubrey Hicks offers an illustration of how little world news reached even the best-informed workers. His father, a painter on the Rothschild estate at Tring, had attended night school and read widely, and unlike most of his neighbours he took in a quality newspaper, the Daily Chronicle. Young Aubrey read it avidly... but in the midst of [sensational events such as the sinking of the Titanic and the Wright brothers' first flight] he had only the vaguest recollection of reading something about Sir Edward Grey's diplomacy'.