Few writers can ever have received such an extravagant shower of plaudits as the author of Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia. To almost universal acclaim, Christopher Clark, a Cambridge don of Australian provenance, has written a text whose intellectual content is as cogent as its style is lucid. The reviews bristle with flattering adjectives: ‘riveting’, ‘illuminating’, ‘profoundly satisfying’, ‘enthralling’, ‘authoritative’, ‘shrewd’ and ‘judicious’. Clark rejects the jaded accusations against the Hohenzollern state, offering in their place a portrait of a polity that was
...more
