His departure from Bradford became controversial when David Mellor, the radio presenter and former MP, alleged that Kamara may have lost his job for racist reasons.Bates was appointed at the start of the season after Stoke had failed to lure a high-profile successor to Lou Macari. Putting paid to any idea that the conflict would be over by Christmas, British forces alone had sustained casualties of 100,000 by year's end and if the war needed a more eloquent testimony to its futility than this, 25 December 1914 provided it. Meeting one another in no-man's-land during an informal truce, Germans swapped cigars for English soldiers' jam and exchanged festive greetings in simple French.Mike Higgins. There are any number of reasons why the SS Titanic ended its maiden voyage imbedded in the ocean floor in the early hours of 15 April 1912 - poor visibility, a negligent captain, a big hunk of ice.

To this list the film-maker James Cameron adds one more contributing factor to lessen the burden of responsibility on that iceberg: a pair of bored officers distracted from their vigil at the warning bell by the sight of a couple canoodling on the deck. This is actually one of the more plausible details in the thoroughly loopy new film Titanic, if only because it obeys the cardinal rule of the disaster movie, which decrees that any and all catastrophes shall occur in exact correlation to the effrontery of the characters involved You play with fire and you get burnt Or drowned. The naivety of the movie's characterisation is almost charming. The voyeuristic sailors aren't to blame for the corpses littering the ocean.

It's the fault of those young lovers - Rose (Kate Winslet), who is poised to marry into obscene wealth but chooses instead to desert her fiance in favour of Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), a scruffy ragamuffin from that overpopulated district, the Wrong Side of the Tracks. Within five weeks, Austro-Hungarian aggression, backed up by Germany's volatile Kaiser, had caused various treaties to be violated and jeopardized the brittle network of alliances which maintained European peace. Germany invaded Belgium on 4 August and Britain - by virtue of the 1839 Treaty of London which had guaranteed Belgian neutrality - was at war.Within months, a line of stagnant trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland signalled the muddy stalemate that much of the Great War was to be taken up in. Reports reached the government of infantrymen daring each other to attack enemy machine gun posts just to relieve the monotony.

Boredom rather than death, it seems, is what most soldiers feared at first. The assassination, by a Serbian, of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on 28 June provoked an unexpectedly severe reaction from the Vienna government. Today our consideration of the last 98 years takes us to 1914 and, as the picture above reflects, the outbreak of war in Europe. The little boy pictured in due course became eighth Marquess of Lansdowne but, in spite of his appearance, grew up in a remarkably progressive family. His father, Lord "Charlie" Mercer Nairne, was killed in France in October 1914, and Lord Lansdowne, the boy's grandfather, distinguished himself in the prevailing mood of jingoism by turning his home, Bowood Park, into a hospital and arguing throughout the war for peace without retribution. The speed with Europe plunged into conflict took everyone by surprise. As part of Photo 98, The Independent has been given exclusive access to the Hulton Getty Picture Collection to mount a photo-history of the twentieth-century to date.