Will I love The Pursuit of Power?

This sweeping yet deeply readable book offers a wonderful blend of political, military, social, cultural, and intellectual history. My biggest takeaway was Evans’s argument that democracy and democratic institutions contained within them the seeds of their own destruction—an idea that foreshadows the rise of fascism and, unfortunately, resonates again in our own century. Coming from Evans, whose earlier work focused on the Third Reich, that perspective is especially revealing. Alongside the big themes, I found countless fascinating details I hadn’t known: that Lord Acton’s famous line about power corrupting referred to the papacy; that dueling in late nineteenth-century Germany became… show more.

It takes real historic breadth to write a comprehensive history of the nineteenth century and only a historian of the quality of Evans could pull it off so convincingly. Like his mentor Eric Hobsbawm—but unencumbered by the Marxian straight-jacket—Evans masterfully draws the links not only between decades and between countries and continents but also between the social, the economic, and the political. His book is no demographic history, but it takes demography seriously. This really matters in a century in which the Malthusian bonds were broken for some of humanity, not all of it, making it… show more.