PositiveThe Financial TimesHe does not have a grand ideological thesis to propound, and he is not writing as an iconoclast, eager to smash previous interpretations into tiny shards. He adopts as his broad, unexceptional theme the pursuit of power in all its many forms, which, he quite plausibly suggests, took place more nakedly after 1815 than in earlier periods ... In these sketches, and throughout the volume, Evans gives thorough coverage to the continent as a whole, especially when it comes to writers and intellectuals ... It makes for a traditional framework, perhaps, but one whose enduring value is confirmed by Evans’s fine scholarship. And it reveals him to be more elegiac, in the end, than he might like to admit.
