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'. Sunday Telegraph