This ranks as one of the very best history books of the year. Its been a superb year for history but Augustus the Strong by Tim Blanning ranks up there with the very very best!
I cant recommend it strongly enough. It should be a bestseller and if you give any present to history-loving friends or relations this Xmas, this will delight them.
Lets just say its is both scholarly and outrageous, beautifully written, deeply researched and even now shocking in its debauchery but also acute in its analysis of power politics that explains some features of today's geopolitics, specifically the eclipse of Poland, Sweden and the Ottomans, the rise of Russia. But it is so riotous it is impossible to read without thinking of picaresque characters and wild scenes in the movies and novels of Fielding’s Tom Jones and Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon.
Augustus the Strong was an artistic maestro and unscrupulous political failure and a world-class sinner famed for one pub-quiz-winning fact: he is supposed to have fathered 354 children. And the fact he was said to have slept with his own daughter without realizing so plentiful was his progeny. However, as Tim Blanning reveals in Augustus the Strong, his irresistible feast of a biography of the now oft-forgotten Polish king who led a major European power for more than 35 tumultuous years, this was little more than gossipy exaggeration. Augustus actually fathered just eight children, out-conceived by Louis XIV and Charles II.
I quote one para from my review in the everbrilliant culture section of @FT :
"Priapic sexual infidelity and tireless hunting were both regarded then as essential pastimes for monarchs. Augustus did both to excess. He was a champion fox-tosser (200 killed in one bout) and held hunts in which animals were chased into rivers and off cliffs. Meanwhile, his lovers were legion (English diplomat George Stepney noted “the first woman who offers is sure of his caresses”) " and we meet many in the book...
His politics were pretty catastrophic. When Augustus died obese in 1733 at 62: Poland and Sweden were finished as great powers and Russia was ascendant.
At the end of the book Prof Blanning writes “a virtuous king is a king who has shirked his proper function: to embody for his subjects an ideal of illustrious misbehaviour absolutely beyond their reach.”
That is very much Augustus.
ft.com/content/ea60b8… via @ft
I cant recommend it strongly enough. It should be a bestseller and if you give any present to history-loving friends or relations this Xmas, this will delight them.
Lets just say its is both scholarly and outrageous, beautifully written, deeply researched and even now shocking in its debauchery but also acute in its analysis of power politics that explains some features of today's geopolitics, specifically the eclipse of Poland, Sweden and the Ottomans, the rise of Russia. But it is so riotous it is impossible to read without thinking of picaresque characters and wild scenes in the movies and novels of Fielding’s Tom Jones and Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon.
Augustus the Strong was an artistic maestro and unscrupulous political failure and a world-class sinner famed for one pub-quiz-winning fact: he is supposed to have fathered 354 children. And the fact he was said to have slept with his own daughter without realizing so plentiful was his progeny. However, as Tim Blanning reveals in Augustus the Strong, his irresistible feast of a biography of the now oft-forgotten Polish king who led a major European power for more than 35 tumultuous years, this was little more than gossipy exaggeration. Augustus actually fathered just eight children, out-conceived by Louis XIV and Charles II.
I quote one para from my review in the everbrilliant culture section of @FT :
"Priapic sexual infidelity and tireless hunting were both regarded then as essential pastimes for monarchs. Augustus did both to excess. He was a champion fox-tosser (200 killed in one bout) and held hunts in which animals were chased into rivers and off cliffs. Meanwhile, his lovers were legion (English diplomat George Stepney noted “the first woman who offers is sure of his caresses”) " and we meet many in the book...
His politics were pretty catastrophic. When Augustus died obese in 1733 at 62: Poland and Sweden were finished as great powers and Russia was ascendant.
At the end of the book Prof Blanning writes “a virtuous king is a king who has shirked his proper function: to embody for his subjects an ideal of illustrious misbehaviour absolutely beyond their reach.”
That is very much Augustus.
ft.com/content/ea60b8… via @ft
This: @PenguinUKBooks @PenguinBooks @AllenLaneBooks
I will do my big list of top history books in december
Its been dark year. But illuminated by some brilliant history books in 24. This is up there w the best
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