Description: First published in the United Kingdom as: The Holy Roman Empire: a thousand years of Europe's history.
Brief description: Peter H. Wilson is the author of Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, an Economist and Sunday Times Best Book, and The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy, winner of the Distinguished Book Award from the Society of Military History. He has appeared on BBC Radio and has written for Prospect, the Los Angeles Times, and the Financial Times. President of the Society for the History of War and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Wilson is Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford. His work has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish.
Review Quotes: If, like most people, you know little more about the Holy Roman Empire than Voltaire's bon mot--that it 'was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire'--then this is the book for you. In his masterly study of the original '1,000-year Reich' (Hitler's was merely a grotesque caricature), the Oxford professor Peter H. Wilson condenses a great deal of modern scholarship while wearing his learning lightly... Wilson's account is distinctive in treating the empire neither as a sequence of obstacles on the path to national self-determination, nor as a blueprint for the European Union. Instead, he seeks to understand how and why it worked.--Daniel Johnson "Sunday Times" (1/17/2016 12:00:00 AM)