PENGUIN ORANGE SPINES : FREDERICK THE GREAT PB – TIM BLANNING

" Highly readable and deeply researched – Andrew Roberts Masterful … brilliantly brings to life one of the most complex characters of modern European history – Sunday Telegraph It is sure to be the standard English-language account for many years. It instructs; it entertains; and it surprises – Philip Mansel, The Spectator Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, dominated the eighteenth century in the same way that Napoleon dominated the start of the nineteenth. He was a force of nature, a ruthless, brilliant, charismatic military commander, a monarch of exceptional energy and talent, a gifted composer, performer, poet and philosopher, and a discerning patron of artists, architects and writers, most famously Voltaire. From the very start of his reign he was an intensely divisive figure – fascinating even to those who hated him. Tim Blanning s brilliant new biography captures Frederick s vitality, complexity and flawed genius better than any previous writer. He also recreates a remarkable era, the last flowering of the old regime that would be swept away almost immediately after Frederick s death by the French Revolution. Equally at home on the battlefield or in the music room at Frederick s extraordinary miniature palace of Sanssouci, Blanning draws on a lifetime s immersion in the eighteenth century to present him in the round, with new attention paid to his cultural self-fashioning, including his sexuality. Frederick s spectre has hung over Germany ever since, both as inspiration and warning – Blanning at last allows us to understand him in his own time."