Frederick the Great: King of Prussia

"Tim Blanning’s book is both an important academic work written by a senior scholar and also exactly the kind of properly descriptive biography that the general reader is looking for. If you’re looking for one book on Frederick the Great, this is it, without any doubt. There have been a lot of very important works on Frederick produced by German authors. I’m thinking particularly of Jürgen Luh’s Der Große , Thomas Biskup Friedrichs Größe, and the biographical studies by Wolfgang Burgdorf and Peter-Michael Hahn . These all came out as part of a huge flowering of literature on Frederick, marking the 300th anniversary of his birth in 2012. Tim Blanning’s book was published just a few years afterward, and he incorporated all of this new scholarship that has been produced on Frederick in recent years. He produced a book that is very important for scholars but you can also read it without having any prior knowledge of Frederick. He tells the whole story in an entertaining and interesting way."