Julian Fellowes
Tell Us More About the Fat Empress
The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815
By Charles Ingrao
Cambridge University Press 262pp £27.95 order from our bookshop
By his own admission in the preface Charles Ingrao has been set an impossible task. Namely, to address simultaneously both a student and a scholarly audience on this most diverse of historical subjects. Unable to assume much fundamental knowledge in his readership, he is also unwilling to neglect the minutiae of every issue. In short, his brief was to tell the detailed story of the most complex monarchical grouping of states in Europe throughout two centuries of unremitting religious, philosophical, social and political turbulence in 262 pages. Before one considers the degree of his success or lack of it, like Dr Johnson’s walking dog, we must first admire the fact that he has done it at all.
The book’s principal achievement, in keeping with the rest of the ‘new approach’ series from the Cambridge Press, is to challenge the traditional, often unconscious assumption that the Habsburg monarchy was not much more than a huge jumble of unrelated entities misruled from Vienna by corruption in uniform. A sort
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'For all his reputation as the great theorist of democracy, Tocqueville was never an enthusiast for universal suffrage or the kind of electoral politics that went with it.'
Alan Ryan asks what Alexis de Tocqueville's ideas can teach us today.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/oui-the-people
'Within two days of arriving at the retreat, he is called away to attend the funeral of a friend killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks ... Carrère is soon divorced and suicidal, interned in a psychiatric institution where he must slowly rebuild his life.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lunge-twist-pose
'Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much.'
Read Lucy Wooding's review of Clare Jackson's 'Devil-Land', which has won the @WolfsonHistory prize.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-view-from-across-the-channel