Customer Reviews

The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815 (Penguin History of Europe)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is not the first volume to be published in the Penguin History of Europe. That honor belongs to William Jordan's "Europe in the High Middle Ages", a book not as praiseworthy as Mr. Blanning's, which reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic have regarded as one of the top history books of 2007.

"The Pursuit of Glory" is a very ambitious book. It covers, in a single volume, a period that took up 4 volumes in Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization. It begins during the minority of Louis XIV, and ends with Napoleon en route to Saint Helena. In between these two, Blanning tells the stories of the trial and execution of Charles I and of James II's dereliction of duties, of pathetic Charles II and his poisoned inheritance, of Charles XII's madness and Peter the Great's folly, of Elizabeth Farnese's ambition, of Louis XV's lack of foresight, of Maria Theresa's efforts to survive and thrive next to fearsome neighbours, such as Frederick the Great, of Joseph II's pigheadedness and Katherine the Great's acquisitiveness, of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, of Brissot and the Girondins, of the Abbe de Sieyes and Napoleon, of Talleyrand, Pitt and Metternich. All the usual suspects turn up, but this is not dynastic history as usual.

Blanning tells us why road locations were not chosen in the same way in Britain, Spain or France, and what that meant for those countries' future development. He shows us that hunting was a very important activity, central indeed to the kingly role, and highlights the popularity of cock fighting in Britain all the way to Queen Victoria's reign. He compares Mozart's with Beethoven's funeral and uses it to give evidence of the artist's role from the classical to the romantic period. He derides the popular perception of the XVIII century as an age of irreligion, and instead argues that it was an age of faith, with several important revivals still to come, although he acknowledges the decline in the papacy's role since the renaissance. Perhaps the only XVIII century pope worthy of remembrance was Clement XIV, because he suppressed the Jesuit order under pressure from the Bourbon kings of France and Spain. Not the papacy's greatest hour.

In this book Blanning concentrates on the great powers. That meant France, Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia, since Spain, the Dutch Republic, Poland and Sweden went into a steep decline around the middle of the XVII century. France was a superpower until the end of the XVII century. Then Austria prevailed, before ceding its position to Prussia. On the margins, both Britain and Russia only got stronger, until in 1815 they were able to define the future of Europe. Seen from this perspective, the Napoleonic era is just a grandiose coda to a faded greatness that would never return.

Remarkable to this reader was that "Blitzkrieg" (lightning war) was an invention of Frederick the Great. He understood that a small, (relatively) poor country with a first rate army could hope to prevail against bigger, richer neighbors only through short wars with maximum impact. This meant sharp, painful thrusts instead of long campaigns of attrition. It worked for him: he gambled recklessly and always won. Sometimes it was luck, but over a long reign it was really brilliance. Frederick wanted Prussia to be accepted as a great power. He achieved that. For Frederick, "glory" was a practical concern: survival in the middle of strong, bellicose neighbors, for a small contry lacking natural borders.

For the French leaders from Louis XIV to Napoleon "glory" meant acknowledgment of France as supreme in any and all matters: military, economical, political, philosophic, artistic, literary, religious, etc. It didn't work. Demography and economics were against it. France invaded countries (like the Netherlands in the 1690s) without a clear purpose other than showing it was powerful enough to do so. It spent its wealth promoting revolution in remote regions (in North America in the 1770s and 1780s) while it was unable to pay its debts and its political system crumbled. Eventually it was reduced to fighting alongside satraps against everyone else (under Napoleon), until it was well and truly beaten. It continued to be an important country (indeed, it remains so to this day) but it ceased to be a great power in 1815. The pursuit of glory, which means simply the need to be acknowledged as greater than others and thus entitled to impose one's views and preferences, sapped its strenght and demoted it to subaltern status. The same thing happened to Spain or to Sweden.

While drawing parallels between the France of 1648-1815 and today's USA is surely beyond the scope of this book, it is a mark of its excellence that it gives elements that could feed such a debate without ever allowing current concerns to intrude into analysis of past events.

An interesting conclusion was that Napoleon's aggression, which nearly resulted in the unification of Europe under his aegis and the end of dynastic politics, so terrified contemporary leaders that they agreed to establish a legal and moral framework that would make such aggression impossible in the future. The framework held out for roughly a century before it unraveled in the trenches of 1914-1918. Wilson tried to revive it with the League of Nations, but to no avail, and it broke down even more spectacularly in 1939-1945. Then it was reinstated (suitably amended) and it has done fairly well for over 60 years. The lesson would be that such frameworks are fragile, that powerful countries often try to bypass them, and that the result can be total war. It also means that we forget our lessons, and that sometimes they need to be retaught so they are not entirely forgotten.

This is a great book. Extremely well written, prodigiously learned, always interesting and endlessly intriguing. I'd say it would be too short even at twice the number of pages.

In the halcyon days of the 1970's, as an undergraduate history major, I set myself the absurdly ambitious goal of mastering world history. I would do this by first reading Palmer and Colton's "History of the Modern World," and then I would tackle Will and Ariel Durant's "Story of Civilization." I made it through the "History of the Modern World" and became so overwhelmed with facts, figures, and dates, I abandoned the original goal. I later discovered that cultivating smaller patches is a more steady path to historical knowledge.

Like-minded undergraduates of today have much more and better information available, and the current volume, the second of Penguin's projected eight volume History of Europe is a good example. Much historical research has been done in the last 30 years, and Tim Blanning, professor of history at Cambridge, makes good use it. It's a big improvement on the Pelican Series of my undergraduate days.

Traditionally history was a record of important people such as popes and kings, and major events such as wars and revolutions. From there, historians would make a few passing comments about the lives of ordinary people. Blanning, on the other hand, after the current fashion, gives us a history of everyday life and then shows how it affects the larger events of the day.

Blanning covers a wide swath of European history: frome the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. He begins the book with the physical realities of the lives of ordinary people. He tells us, for example, how roads in 1648 were not much different those in Roman times. It took about 3 weeks to travel from London to Edinburgh or from Paris to Madrid. By 1815, it took only a week. He describes how an internal system of tariffs in France stunted its economic growth, and how the absence of those tariffs allowed England to excel economically during that period. He describes how the improvements in agriculture led to better diets, which in turn led to healthier people and longer lives. He traces the advancements in medicine that at the beginning of the period was basically quackery, but by the early nineteenth century was scientifically advanced.

Fascinating as all the details are, historian must keep the narrative moving and Banning does this remarkably well. He takes the details of everday life and shows how they relate to the big picture. He does this for most of the book. In the final section, he goes into relations between states, the history with which most of us are familier.

Blannings account of Louis XIV's wars in pursuit of glory are probably his best, hence the title of the book. This period marks the beginning of European nation-states and phenomenon known as nationalism. The Peace of Westphalia is an important event for international relations theory, for politics in Europe from that point on becomes an equilibrium of power among the Great Powers. The equilibrium changed constantly and the map of Europe with it. Leaders of Britain, France, Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburg were always positioning for more power and territory.

Towards the end of the book, Blanning expounds on another of his favorite subjects: the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. He excoriates the French for what began as the liberation of a people but ended up as a series of wars and conquests for the Bonaparte family. (Another good book on this subject isThe First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It by David A. Bell.) Blanning sees the seeds of 20th century totalitarianism and genocide in these events as did David Bell in his book.

I highly recommend this book and look forward to the next volumes in this series.

This is a very ambitious survey. Blanning covers not only the 18th century proper but also the second half of the 17th century and the period of the French Revolution/Napoleonic wars. Similar books often start later and end with the beginning of the French Revolution, so Blanning has really undertaken an enormous task. Surveys like this one force authors into attempts to balance chronological narrative with thematic exposition of major trends. In this fine book, Blanning emphasizes thematic exposition over narrative. The Pursuit of Glory is divided into 4 major sections; Life and Death, Power, Religion and Culture, and War and Peace. The first three, comprising the great majority of the book, are thematic. The War and Peace section is a more traditional narrative overview of European politics and diplomacy. This structure is a little unusual but effective.

The Life and Death section is devoted to demography, transportation, economic history, and agricultural history. Power covers the basic political structures of the differing European societies, the impact of attempted reforms, the complex social history of European elites, and provides a broad brush outline of major political and diplomatic trends. The Religion and Culture section is the most diverse, covering intellectual history such as the Enlightenment, religious history and some efforts to look at religious enthusiasms, aristocratic culture, and the beginnings of the Romantic movement.

All sections, including the War and Peace narrative section, are very well done. Blanning is a fluent, sometimes witty, writer. He has to grapple with some controversial historiographic issues, such as the nature of the Enlightenment and the nascent Industrial Revolution, and does so in a generally sensible way. Some themes that emerge are the increasing population and economic vigor of Europe, particularly Western Europe, the parallel growths of the power of the state and the public sphere, and an increasing emphasis on individualism and human capacities. In terms of traditional political and diplomatic history, the themes are the decline of France, the emergence of the great peripheral powers, Russia and Britain, the emergence of Prussia, and the surprising resilience of the Austrian Hapsburgs.

As with all surveys, some things get neglected. Blanning's thematic approach to social, economic, and intellectual history generally works well. On the other hand, it is sometimes hard to get a sense of historical evolution of changes in these different areas from his thematic expositions. Most of the topics discussed are both crucial and very interesting but there are at least a couple of major omissions. There is little discussion of science or math in this book. This is the period of Descartes, Huygens, Newton, Boyle, Linneaus, Morgagni, Laviosier, Hutton, and many others. Similarly, there is little discussion of the history of technology, another major omission. In contrast, Blanning has a whole chapter on the history of palaces and gardens, and almost a whole chapter on the social history of hunting. These are both interesting topics but could easily have been dealt with more concisely and some other important topics discussed. It would have been worthwhile to discuss the extra-European impacts of the 18th century states. This is the period is which the European economies, particularly Britain, begin to dominate the world but there is no description of the expansion of world trade and domination. While Blanning does a good job of emphasizing the reality of the 18th century as a century of faith, particularly popular religious movements like Pietism, I think he neglects the important relationship between the early Enlightenment and moderate Protestant theology.

It is unfortunate that this book has been published with no footnotes, an obstacle to pursuing the many interesting questions raised in the text. The bibliography is decent but not annotated, which should be required for survey volumes.

I agree with all that has been said by the previous reviewers: the writing is excellent and the scholarship outstanding. However, despite the fact that I enjoyed it thoroughly, I can't help wondering what niche it fills. The general reader may well be baffled since Blanning assumes a fairly solid background in the overall history of the period. Without something to cling to, his blithe disregard for chronology even within a particular topic area is likely to be confusing

Researching students will be frustrated by the inexplicable lack of footnotes. Blanning liberaly quotes other historians and sometimes even cites the work he is refering to, but nowhere is there a formal footnote to aid the researcher.

Serious scholars might find the work entertaining but would probably conclude that the breadth far exceeded the depth.

That having been said, I have to admit I couldn't put it down, and the previous reviewers have all agreed that in spite of a few cavils, they, too, have found the work commendable, fascinating, and well worth reading. It's highly unlikely that we share closely similar backgrounds and tastes, so my concern about the narrow niche this book might fill is probably without merit.

Nonetheless, I think it would be daunting to come to this work without some previous awareness of the events of this period in Europe.

I especially find the "rambling and repetitive" issues with this book ironic that here on the web, though not on the hardcopy pages of the book, an editor gets cobilling with the author.

Does this book need to be as long as the four volumes that the Durants used for this same period? No. In fact, this would have been a great read with 100 fewer pages and better organization.

Beyond that, the "five revolutions" of the subtitle get muddied and mushed together at times. Weaving them together would have been one thing, but muddling them together is another.

Finally, beyond the lack of footnotes noted by another reviewer, is the paucity of maps. Two maps on France, of its polity divisions under the Bourbons and of its departments-division by the Revolution, should be sine qua nons for a book like this. And, given where many of the wars were fought, one of the Lower Rhine/Low Countries should also have been in here.

As it was, I got some new empirical insights into the start of British growth and development, like the rise in toll roads, and generally better British organization.

This might be a borderline 3/4 star if I'm really generous, but it's ranked too highly by too many other people, so it gets a downward bump from me.

I read a lot, but only rarely - usually when I find a book either supremely odious or sublimely magnificent - do I bother to write a review here on Amazon. I've just finished Tim Blanning's "Pursuit Of Glory," and must record that it is undoubtedly among the finest books I've read in many years. I like to keep my reviews short, as personal experience tells me they are more frequently read, so here goes.

First, the book is beautifully written. Mr. Blanning's prose is reminiscent (to me) of the great AJP Taylor: pithy, informal and yet learned and erudite. His tone is never didactic; indeed, I had the impression of being in the company of a genuinely friendly and astonishingly articulate tourguide through history. If that sounds off-putting, it is not. This book is more Gibbon than Fodor's, but it is never dry. His wry sense of humor, never intrusive, is most welcome.

The range of topics is breathtaking, including road building, religion, hunting, war, government, trade, economics, and culture. Each is covered briskly but authoritatively - a miraculous feat in itself. Moreover, Mr. Blanning draws numerous connections between the topics that are, taken together, extraordinarily illuminating.

As a final note I must mention the "Conclusion" chapter. For direct, beautiful prose and incisive analysis, I can think of no equal in my recent reads.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

The existing reviews give a good sense for what this book covers and I would like to try to add a bit beyond what has been said. I am not a historian, just a general reader. (But the book was pitched to general readers, so I think I can have a say).

First, Mr. Blanning has clearly "been there, done that, and got the t-shirt to prove it" when it comes to his subject matter. He is the master of the choice example, which could only be achieved through extensive travel, terrific language skills, and years of thinking and teaching. He is positively interesting, and pulls the reader in. Would love to have dinner with this guy, my treat.

Second, like many great historians, Blanning is attracted to ambivalence. In the concluding chapter he is quite explicit: there are two narratives that can be maintained about this period, a progressive one and a pessimistic one. Actually, one would be very hard pressed to purely progressive or purely pessimistic - it's up to each person to mix the two according to taste and all sorts of mixes are plausible given the evidence. Maybe a more interesting way to put it is that this period of history is not one of pure progress by any means. Strikes me as realistic.

One of his favorite sources of ambivalence is whether "x" is a revolution or an evolution. As in industrial, commercial, communications, and so on. He seems to fall in the evolutionary camp but I found him hazy in his commitment - he strikes me as more "evolution with punctuated equilibrium." Again, realistic. Bottom-line: his ambivalences make him an interesting thinker.

In truth, I came close to giving him 4 stars, however, for several reasons. First: the material at the end of the book - the concluding chapter--would have been more helpful at the beginning of the book. Not a big deal. Second, he should have defined some limits to his subject matter. This becomes very apparent in Section 4: War and Peace. At several points he acknowledges that he is attempting summaries in a few pages that would normally take several volumes. Not a good idea. Section 4 is for the reader with a hardcore interest in war and a solid knowledge base - not me, and I was always feeling lost.

Finally, I wonder if he did the Church right. He is not a fiery anti-cleric, but he seems to have little ambivalence about religion and churches (as seen most directly in chapter 7), and so tends to lose his effectiveness. Is the story of religion during this period just one of accumulation of wealth, misuse of power, and so on? At one point he writes that perhaps most bishops were well-educated, pious, diligent and effective administrators (p. 370), but the outburst goes nowhere.
If Blanning has an Achille's heel, I think it is that on the issue of religion--which was such a central force in the lives of people in this period--he cannot really sustain any ambivalence. We learn how long it took people to walk places but nothing of their interior lives as Christian people or the centrality of the local parish to community life. I am reminded of the old peasant lady who houses a communist official in the Georgian film "Repentance." As the official eats one her cakes--shaped like a church--and brags about a road that will be built, she snarls "What good is a road if it does not lead to a church?" I suspect most of the people who are Mr. Blanning's subject matter would agree with that sentiment, but in this book we learn mostly about the road.

I decided to read Tim Blanning's "The Pursuit of Glory," in order to better understand what set the stage for a twentieth century replete with totalitarianism, genocide, and economic upheaval leading up to a twenty-first century beginning with an American regime tilting ominously towards some of the worst features of the prior century's fascistic tendencies.

Blanning attempts to cover European history from the treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which concluded the Thirty Year's War to 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in roughly 677 pages. Given the plethora of detailed material this task could easily have taken 4 volumes of that number of pages as in fact the Durants did in their "Story of Civilization" series.

There seems to be no question as to Blanning's mastery of the material of this period, and I found his writing style more entertaining and readable than that of the Durants'. But I ultimately found the book disappointing for a number of reasons.

First, I believe this work is organizationally flawed. Once Blanning chose to forego employing a linear approach, he clearly needed to contrive a thematic structure within which the massive amount of information about this period could be organized and conveyed in order to optimize the reader's ability to absorb it. Blanning certainly had many options from which to choose. For example, he might have centered the narrative around the various interrelationships among the historical personalities, including how they came into and out of power, how they attempted to influence each other etc.

The subtitle of the book, "The Five Revolutions That Made Modern Europe 1648 - 1815," would have, in my view, provided just such an excellent strategy, and in fact I bought this book, and, I expect, others have on the mistaken assumption that this subtitle was descriptive of what the book intended to focus on. Blanning apparently had no such intention in mind. Except for the back cover of the book, where, I assume, it is the marketing editor's blurb that informs us that the five revolutions referred to in the subtitle are: "scientific, industrial, American, French, and romantic," nowhere else in the book is there mention of them as a group, or as the defining events of the period, let alone as organizing principles, and without that blurb, I would be hard pressed to name which five revolutions Blanning himself might have been referring to.

Instead, Blanning structures his book around the wholly arbitrary themes: "Life and Death," which contains material about the development of communications, including transportation, medicine etc, "Power," including discussion of rulers, reform, and revolution, "Religion and Culture," including material on gardens and palaces, and a discussion on the dialectic between what he calls "the Culture of Feeling," and the "Culture of Reason," and finally, Part Four: "War and Peace," which is the most linearly written and most compelling narrative. Perhaps he should have used Part Four as the template and filled in the rest of the material in and around that structure.

Except for Part Four, this structure has the effect of providing a conglomeration of facts, events, and characters interspersed in and among the various themes without a coherent context holding them together so that one gets the sense of slogging through details and from time to time asking oneself, who is this person, or that monarch, and who is related to whom, and again, why? I had the sense that it needed one more rewrite to get to the level of coherence I was missing.

This is not to say that there aren't insightful arguments presented or conclusions drawn. There are many. For example, there is a fascinating discussion on pages 596 - 9, which describes the effects of how the British resolution of their "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, which confirmed that "public finance would be subject to parliamentary control," contrasted with Louis XIV's absolute control over public finance in France. This gave the British a huge advantage in their ability to fund their war efforts since, one, the system they devised for revenue income through collection of excise and customs made these taxes invisible and therefore easier to collect, and two, with the formation of the Bank of England, the British government had the ability to finance its national debt much more efficiently and effectively than the French monarchy did. In contrast to the situation in Louis's seventeenth century France, where tax farmers collected the government's income, and the monarch himself had to borrow funds on his own credit, in the UK "the money was lent not to the monarch but to the nation, with the nation's entire landed wealth, represented by Parliament, as the collateral." p. 596 It is easy to see, given these differences why Great Britain was able to remain economically independent, and how it became a dominant world power at least until 1914.

For the sake of space I will offer only one more complaint: which is: the lack of sufficient material about Turkey. One gathers from repeated references to Turkey that it was an incredibly influential power during this period. Yet, there is precious little here about its internal political development, the history of its ruling elites, or economic situation, let alone the undoubtedly huge influence of Islam on its historical agenda. We only get to know Turkey as the shadow that is casts on Russia, The Holy Roman Empire, The Balkans, Hungary etc., never in its own right. In my view, there is no accounting for this omission.

While I have to say I did profit from the pile of facts, views, and insights that comprise "The Pursuit of Glory," I think Blanning would have done us all a bigger favor, if he had given it one more draft worth of work, in which to write the book that his subtitle so compellingly implied it was, an elucidation of what he considers the five (or more) revolutions were during this period, how they inter-related with each other, and how they contributed to what the modern world turned out to be.

As I progressed through the public education system, I somehow maintained an erroneous concept that national boundaries, country names, and governments were, with very few exceptions, pretty firmly established. In more recent times, I learned that changes can occur, viz. the break up of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Still, such things seemed to be the exceptions, not the rule, anomalies if you will. Blanning's book has, I believe, corrected my misconception of national unities for all time. In fact, it seems that a hard working peasant might go abed one night in 18th Century Europe only to awaken the next morning in a brand new country with a brand new ruler--not that such things would be very significant to said peasant, of course.

At a time that personal relationships among rulers and dynastic considerations were driving forces in determining the leadership of countries, our present-day concept of a nation-state responsive to its citizens, or even to a privileged coterie of citizens, would have been unimaginably strange, peculiar, and unworkable in 18th Century Europe. So was the concept of total war and "winner take all." Wars could be lost without necessarily endangering ones crown. Enemies in one war could be found as allies in the next, and vice versa. Wars themselves could be launched for accumulation of "gloire" by the king, not necessarily acquisition of more land or treasure of any material value.

Even though all this transpired only two hundred years ago, the basic concepts of what constitutes a nation, what makes a ruler, what justifies a war, what becomes of the spoils of war, and so forth were substantially different from those concepts today. Indeed, Blanning's book leads the reader into social, political, and cultural realms so different from ours that one might almost think it fiction--but of course it is not, and that fact makes it all the more wondrous.

Instructive as well is the somewhat different view of the American Revolution than the one we are often presented in U.S. schools. As Blanning explains, "[A]fter the outbreak of revolution in France, Louis XVI expressed regret that he had authorized the American intervention, complaining that his advisers had taken advantage of his youth, . . . Without the assistance of the French, not to mention the Spanish, who joined the war in April 1779, and the Dutch, against whom the British launched a pre-emptive declaration of war in December 1780, the Americans could not have won their independence in the manner and at the speed they did." Okay, I admit recalling that my public school history book did mention some French assistance, but the Spanish? The Dutch? I think they may have been conveniently left out.

I greatly appreciate the fact that Blanning does not orient his historical perspective totally from a military viewpoint as numerous history books seem to do. There really was more to life than fighting battles and negotiating truces and treaties. In fact, his book begins with the development of communication over distance, explaining the development of roads and waterways, including the parallel development of customs duties and tolls. Particularly fascinating also is the section dealing with religion and the churches. This book does indeed take a comprehensive approach to the historical description it presents of 18th Century Europe.

Have I any criticisms of THE PURSUIT OF GLORY? I did find myself growing weary at times of some of the detail in this 677-page (not even counting the index) work. In spots, the level of detail, such as place names not familiar to the general reader, becomes tedious. I wish that more maps showing the changes in the face of Europe had been included and had been spaced throughout the book so that they appeared at the beginning of each section dealing with their time frame. The few maps, informative as they are, are grouped at the front of the book rather than appearing with the explanatory text pertaining to them. I actually forgot they were there and found myself a little bit lost now and then in the extensive text. A similar complaint can be lodged against the illustrations in the book. Rather than appearing in conjunction with the relevant text, they are all grouped together in one place and in a seemingly random part of the book where their section actually interrupts the text. This is done, I assume, to make the binding of the book a simpler matter for the publisher since the illustrations are on slick paper that differs from the rest. However, making life easier for publishers is not a valid goal of readers and purchasers of their products. Oh yes, one last mild complaint--for much of his book, Blanning seems to have been enraptured by the adjective "eponymous." I came to dread encountering that adjective again and again. Okay, I'm splitting hairs, but I admitted it was a mild complaint, didn't I?

Reading this entire lengthy tome has proved to be unusually time-consuming for me, but I am pleased that I persevered, for it has taught me quite a bit about its subject that I did not know or, worse, about which I had entertained erroneous conceptions. I do recommend it to readers interested in the events that underlie and form modern Europe and indeed the modern world.

The period from the peace of Westphalia to the Congress of Vienna has the virtue for the high-end popular historian of being close enough in time and culture to be relevant, while also being distant enough to be contemplated more or less for pleasure. It also has the further advantage, for the commercially ambitious author, that the personal was very much the political - vast impersonal historical forces can't even begin to account for the likes of Catherine the Great, Louis XIV, or Frederick the Great.

The somewhat austere Prof. T.C.W. Blanning has revised himself as just plain Tim (registering this little bit of image modification, I could not help thinking of the Billy Connolly character from Monty Python's Holy Grail - sorry) to write this. And this is a very much a Tim, rather than a Prof. T.C.W. sort of book: it manages to be relaxed, entertaining and learned, and to cover a lot of ground without losing - or at least any more than necessary - focus. And yes, the first chapter, on travel and communications, is as good as everyone says it is.

I do wonder if Tim is aiming just a smidgen higher than he should have. Casual jokes about cultural theory which contrast Hegelian aircraft carriers with positivist fishing fleets, are very funny for a small audience (more Clarendon than Allen-Lane sized, I would have thought), but maybe a bit exclusionary - I wonder what people outside that audience think. Similarly, I was outrageously flattered at the large intersection between my library and his (said intersection being documented mostly as casual, and un-bibed, allusions in the text). Again, I'm not sure what the larger audience might make of this.

Anyway, an excellent, entertaining book, and I definitely agree with another reviewer who thought that Tim Blanning must be great at a dinner party (and also, maybe more importantly, as a thesis supervisor). In fact, given that he appears to have written his dissertation on Mainz, if he ever is back in town, and drops me a line, I would be delighted to offer a glass of riesling.