Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947

'Of the "Great Powers" that dominated Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, Prussia is the only one to have vanished … Iron Kingdom is not just good: it is everything a history book ought to be … The nemesis of Prussia has cast such a long shadow that German historians have tiptoed around the subject. Thus it was left to an Englishman to write what is surely the best history of Prussia in any language' Sunday Telegraph