RaveThe Times (UK)Almost everything about Louis XIV — the size of his palaces, the length of his reign, the height of his heels — was on a gargantuan scale ... Such splendour is there not just to dazzle, but also to deceive, and excavating the “real” Louis beneath the mountains of eulogy poses a major challenge for any would-be biographer. Philip Mansel’s impressive new survey — the best single-volume account of the reign in any language — moves deftly between these fictive and objective worlds. He revels in the fêtes and fireworks, the frescoes and tapestries, that glorified Louis’s rule. But he is never blind to Louis’s failings and absurdities, and clearly delineates how the \'absolute monarch\' was never as absolute as he wished the world to think.
Martyn Rady
RaveThe Literary Review (UK)... [Rady] has produced a Rolls-Royce of a narrative that motors through ten centuries of history with an effortlessness that belies the intellectual horsepower beneath the bonnet ... In less able hands, a narrative canvas as broad as this would sag and unravel. Not so here. Themes and contexts are crisply delineated. Major developments – in the spheres of culture and ideas, economy and society, diplomacy and war – are seamlessly introduced. And the vast cast of characters is depicted with a mix of insight, sympathy and astringent Gibbonian wit that makes them instantly memorable ... It is not the least of Martyn Rady’s achievements that his book sheds light on the present almost as brightly as it illuminates the past.
