'Let the nations rejoice: this history of Europe is a truly glorious book' John Adamson, Sunday TimesThe Pursuit of Glory brings to life one of the most extraordinary periods in European history – from the battered, introvert continent after the Thirty Years War to the dynamic one that experienced the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon. Tim Blanning depicts the lives of ordinary people and the dominant personalities of the age (Louis XIV, ...

From the acclaimed author of The Pursuit of Glory and Frederick the Great, a riotous biography of the charismatic ruler of 18th-century Poland and Saxony - and his catastrophic reign.Winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography 2025Shortlisted for the 2025 Apollo Book of the Year Award'It's been a superb year for history but Augustus the Strong ranks up there with the very very best! I ca...

The definitive biography of the legendary autocrat whose enlightened rule transformed the map of Europe and changed the course of historyFew figures loom as large in European history as Frederick the Great. When he inherited the Prussian crown in 1740, he ruled over a kingdom of scattered territories, a minor Germanic backwater. By the end of his reign, the much larger and consolidated Prussia ranked among the continent’s great powers. In this magisterial biography...

“A splendidly pithy and provocative introduction to the culture of Romanticism.”—The Sunday Times“[Tim Blanning is] in a particularly good position to speak of the arrival of Romanticism on the Euorpean scene, and he does so with a verve, a breadth, and an authority that exceed every expectation.”—National ReviewFrom the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise accou...

Once musicians such as Mozart were little more than court servants; now they are multimillionaire superstars wielding more power than politicians. How did this extraordinary change come about?Tim Blanning's brilliantly enjoyable book examines how everything from the cult of the romantic to technology and travel all fed the inexorable rise of music in the West, making it the most dominant and ubiquitous of the art forms. Encompassing balladeers, the great composers, jazz legends and...

George I was not the most charismatic of the Hanoverian monarchs to have reigned in England but he was probably the most important. He was certainly the luckiest.Born the youngest son of a landless German duke, he was taken by repeated strokes of good fortune to become, first the ruler of a major state in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and then the sovereign of three kingdoms (England, Ireland and Scotland).Tim Blanning's incisive short biography examines George...

A Pulitzer Prize Winner and landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born."Not only is it a splendid exploration of several aspects of early modernism in their political context; it is an indicator of how the discipline of intellectual history is currently practiced by its most able and ambitious craftsme...

In one corner, a godless young warrior, Voltaire’s heralded ‘philosopher-king’, the It Boy of the Enlightenment. In the other, a devout if bad-tempered old composer of ‘outdated’ music, a scorned genius in his last years. The sparks from their brief conflict illuminate a turbulent age.Behind the pomp and flash, Prussia's Frederick the Great was a tormented man, son of an abusive king who forced him to watch as his best friend (probably his lover) was beheaded. In what may have been...

Is a tower block, your unmade bed, your lavatory basin, or the bicycle chained to the gate next door a work of art? Why should a novel have a beginning, a middle, and an end; or even a story? Whether we recognise it or not, virtually every aspect of our life today has been influenced in part by the aesthetic legacy of Modernism. In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler examines how and why Modernism began, explaining what it is and showing how it has gradually informed a...

In this marvelous book, acclaimed around the world, Alberto Manguel takes us on a fascinating exploration of what it means to be a reader of books. A History of Reading is a brilliant reminder of why we cherish the act of reading—despite distractions throughout the ages, from the Inquisition to the lures of cyberspace. He shows us what happens when we read; who we become; and how reading teaches us how to live. He reminds us that we live in books as well as among them—how we find ...

Eyewitnessing evaluates the place of images among other kinds of historical evidence. By reviewing the many varieties of images by region, period and medium, and looking at the pragmatic uses of images (e.g. the Bayeux Tapestry, an engraving of a printing press, a reconstruction of a building), Peter Burke sheds light on our assumption that these practical uses are ‘reflections’ of specific historical meanings and influences. He also shows how this assumption can be problematic.

'I am not a man, I am dynamite.' Ecce Homo is an autobiography like no other. Deliberately provocative, Nietzsche subverts the conventions of the genre and pushes his philosophical positions to combative extremes, constructing a genius-hero whose life is a chronicle of incessant self-overcoming. Written in 1888, a few weeks before his descent into madness, the book sub-titled 'How To Become What You Are' passes under review all Nietzsche's previous works so that w...