a most illuminating and readable general survey.... This book is well organized, well produced, and well written. It belongs among the ten most useful books on this period to the historian and... to the general reader." --American Historical Review"This splendid volume fills a gap in the vast outpouring of literature on the military aspects of the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon by combining a description of the major changes and trends of warfare with a comparative discussion of the French military establishment and the armies of its major opponents.... As another contribution to 'synthetic' history, it is a very successful exercise." --Military Affairs..". a splendid little study which will be of considerable interest both to the general student and specialist.... [it] fills a definite need for a survey of the military developments of the period and one can learn a great deal from a close reading of it." --History"A clear, lively, and well-produced survey that relies upon the best scholarship of several languages.... " --Library JournalIn a comprehensive study of a crucial era in warfare--from the last decades of the ancient regime to Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo--Rothenberg describes the organization, training methods, equipment, tactics, and strategy of France and its adversaries. He also explores staff systems, logistics, fortifications, medical services, and insurgency and counterinsurgency.

    It was a seismic event that radically transformed France and launched shock waves across the world. In this provocative new history, Peter McPhee draws on a lifetime’s study of eighteenth-century France and Europe to create an entirely fresh account of the world’s first great modern revolution—its origins, drama, complexity, and significance. Was the Revolution a major turning point in French—even world—history, or was it instead a protracted period of violent upheaval and warfare that wrecked millions of lives? McPhee evaluates the Revolution within a genuinely global context: Europe, the Atlantic region, and even farther. He acknowledges the key revolutionary events that unfolded in Paris, yet also uncovers the varying experiences of French citizens outside the gates of the city: the provincial men and women whose daily lives were altered—or not—by developments in the capital. Enhanced with evocative stories of those who struggled to cope in unpredictable times, McPhee’s deeply researched book investigates the changing personal, social, and cultural world of the eighteenth century. His startling conclusions redefine and illuminate both the experience and the legacy of France’s transformative age of revolution.

    Two men conspired to save the continent from French rule: John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and Prince Eugène of Savoy. Deep in Germany, these two committed allies sought to engage Louis's superior forces. At Blenheim, their daring plans came to fruition. The French were utterly destroyed. From the deliberations of kings and princes, to the eyewitness accounts of frontline soldiers, ‘Blenheim: Battle for Europe’ is a compelling account of an often overlooked but major turning point in European history. ‘Not only a highly accomplished account of the battle and its wider consequences, but also a shrewd and persuasive reassessment of the personalities involved’ – Sunday Telegraph ‘Charles Spencer’s new study offers not only a highly accomplished account of the battle and its wider consequences, but also a shrewd and persuasive reassessment of the personalities involved...Spencer’s account maintains the detachment of the professional historian, and is safely ancestor-worship free’ – John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph ‘Charles Spencer has written a history of the War of Spanish Succession — the struggle for European dominance between France and her major European rivals in the early 18th century — in a splendidly old-fashioned style, full of bold epithets and broad judgments...The result is a book that is compulsively readable...the pages of this vividly written book are populated by memorable secondary characters’ – Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday ‘Where Spencer has made a real contribution to our understanding of the war of the Spanish succession is in his exploitation of the French sources — diplomatic and military, including the correspondence between Louis XIV and his generals and diplomats’ – John Crossland, Sunday Times ‘There is much to enjoy in this racy, fast-paced narrative, well stocked with larger-than-life characters...The account of the storming of the Schellenberg heights...is truly gripping’ – Tim Blanning, Times Literary Supplement Charles Spencer was educated at Eton College and obtained his degree in Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of five books, including the Sunday Times bestseller ‘Blenheim: The Battle for Europe’ (shortlisted for History Book of the Year, National Book Awards), 'Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I', ‘The Spencer Family’ and ‘Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier’.

    Thomas Asbridge—a renowned historian who writes with “maximum vividness” (Joan Acocella, The New Yorker)—covers the years 1095 to 1291 in this  big, ambitious, readable account of one of the most fascinating periods in history. From Richard the Lionheart to the mighty Saladin, from the emperors of Byzantium to the Knights Templar, Asbridge’s book is a magnificent epic of Holy War between the Christian and Islamic worlds, full of adventure, intrigue, and sweeping grandeur.

    The real-life protagonist of The Black Count, General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today yet with a story that is strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of the best loved heroes of literature.Yet, hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: the real hero was the son of a black slave -- who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time. Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. Enlisting as a private, he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution in an audacious campaign across Europe and the Middle East – until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat.The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.

    Millions died; empires collapsed; new ideologies and political movements arose; poison gas, warplanes, tanks, submarines, and other technologies appeared. Total war emerged as a grim, mature reality.In The Great War, Peter Hart provides a masterful combat history of this global conflict. Focusing on the decisive engagements, Hart explores the immense challenges faced by the commanders on all sides. He surveys the belligerent nations, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and strategic imperatives. Russia, for example, was obsessed with securing an exit from the Black Sea, while France--having lost to Prussia in 1871, before Germany united--constructed a network of defensive alliances, even as it held a grudge over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Hart offers deft portraits of the commanders, the prewar plans, and the unexpected obstacles and setbacks that upended the initial operations.

    One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it.In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political "reeducation" was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective.A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma's own father's story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war's end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into "normalcy" stand in many ways for his generation's experience.A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.

    From the recollections of the men who were there, esteemed author David Howarth has recreated the battle as it appeared to them on the day it was fought. He follows the fortunes of men of all ranks and on both sides. But it is on the French side that the mysteries remain. Why did Ney attack with cavalry alone? And was Napoleon's downfall really due to the minor ailment he suffered that day? Beautifully written, vivid, and unforgettable, this illuminating history is impossible to put down.

    Quite as much as the Duke of Wellington, it was this club-footed genius of French diplomacy who defeated the great conqueror and delivered France and all Europe from the Emperor's follies. From the Hardcover edition.

    Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world.Miranda Carter uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling to stay in command of politics and world events as history overtook it. George, Nicholas and Wilhelm is a brilliant and sometimes darkly hilarious portrait of these men--damaged, egotistical Wilhelm; quiet, stubborn Nicholas; and anxious, dutiful George--and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, subtle portraits of other familiar figures: Queen Victoria--grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third--whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family left a dangerous legacy; and Edward VII, the playboy "arch-vulgarian" who turned out to have a remarkable gift for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time, Carter weaves through their stories a riveting account of the events that led to World War I, showing how the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to devastating effect.For all three men the war would be a disaster that destroyed forever the illusion of their close family relationships, with any sense of peace and harmony shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.

    With the marriage of Ferdinand & Isabella, the final expulsion of the Moslems and the discovery of America, Spain took on a seemingly unstoppable dynamism that made it into the world's first global power. This amazing success however created many powerful enemies and Elliott's famous book charts the dramatic fall of Habsburg Spain with the same elan as it charts the rise.

    It combines a shrewd insight into character, a vivid realization of the picturesque, and a singular ability to bring the past to blazing life, making it a reading experience as thrilling as any novel. As John D. Rosenberg observes in his Introduction, The French Revolution is “one of the grand poems of [Carlyle’s] century, yet its poetry consists in being everywhere scrupulously rooted in historical fact.”This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition, complete and unabridged, is unavailable anywhere else.

    Once a maritime superpower and ruler of half the world, Britain now occupies an isolated position as an economically fragile island often at odds with her European neighbors. Lawrence James has written a comprehensive, perceptive and insighful history of the British Empire. Spanning the years from 1600 to the present day, this critically acclaimed book combines detailed scholarship with readable popular history.

    The First World War was a truly global conflict from the start, with many of the most decisive battles fought in or directly affecting the Balkans, Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. Even more than World War II, the First World War continues to shape the politics and international relations of our world, especially in hot spots like the Middle East and the Balkans. Strachan has done a masterful job of reexamining the causes, the major campaigns, and the consequences of the First World War, compressing a lifetime of knowledge into a single definitive volume tailored for the general reader. Written in crisp, compelling prose and enlivened with extraordinarily vivid photographs and detailed maps, The First World War re-creates this world-altering conflict both on and off the battlefield—the clash of ideologies between the colonial powers at the center of the war, the social and economic unrest that swept Europe both before and after, the military strategies employed with stunning success and tragic failure in the various theaters of war, the terms of peace and why it didn’t last. Drawing on material culled from many countries, Strachan offers a fresh, clear-sighted perspective on how the war not only redrew the map of the world but also set in motion the most dangerous conflicts of today. Deeply learned, powerfully written, and soon to be released with a new introduction that commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, The First World War remains a landmark of contemporary history.

    He traces the path to war, making clear why Germany and Austria-Hungary were primarily to blame, and describes the gripping first clashes in the West, where the French army marched into action in uniforms of red and blue with flags flying and bands playing. In August, four days after the French suffered 27,000 men dead in a single day, the British fought an extraordinary holding action against oncoming Germans, one of the last of its kind in history. In October, at terrible cost the British held the allied line against massive German assaults in the first battle of Ypres. Hastings also re-creates the lesser-known battles on the Eastern Front, brutal struggles in Serbia, East Prussia and Galicia, where the Germans, Austrians, Russians and Serbs inflicted three million casualties upon one another by Christmas. As he has done in his celebrated, award-winning works on World War II, Hastings gives us frank assessments of generals and political leaders and masterly analyses of the political currents that led the continent to war. He argues passionately against the contention that the war was not worth the cost, maintaining that Germany's defeat was vital to the freedom of Europe. Throughout we encounter statesmen, generals, peasants, housewives and private soldiers of seven nations in Hastings's accustomed blend of top-down and bottom-up accounts: generals dismounting to lead troops in bayonet charges over 1,500 feet of open ground; farmers who at first decried the requisition of their horses; infantry men engaged in a haggard retreat, sleeping four hours a night in their haste. This is a vivid new portrait of how a continent became embroiled in war and what befell millions of men and women in a conflict that would change everything.