Keegan's First World War was good, but it was not as insightful as his Face of Battle or his Reith Lectures, War and Our World. The Reith lectures are worth reading for anyone: they contain the essence of Keegan's thinking, evidently prepared and given when his ego was in check. This is a good thing. I am now reading his book on military intelligence, and it is hard to imagine anyone discussing the First Crusaders and still managing to give to the reader the impression of self-importance. Barbarossa is quite a short essay, with much more space given to pictures than words, but then, this is a book in a series of illustrated histories. One of those pictures, of Russian women making a fire to thaw the soil before erecting a steel barrier during the Battle of Moscow in 1941, speaks volumes. It is hard to believe that I got a PhD in strategic studies without knowing how much the Russians had paid for the WWII victory.
Codevilla and Seabury's War is a good read, and a cogent lesson for anyone who wants to apply the same prism to too many events or problems. These authors work admirable well, but they apply the prism of war to all aspects of international and domestic politics, and it just doesn't fit in that neatly.
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