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Tells the story of a group of highly competitive and mutually suspicious dynasties, and also of a continent uniquely prone to interference from ´semi-detached´ elements, such as Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Britain and the United States.

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Brendan Simms´s formidable, game-changing history of Europe

In this marvelously ambitious and exciting book, Brendan Simms tells the story of Europe´s constantly shifting geopolitics and the peculiar circumstances that have made it both so impossible to dominate, but also so dynamic and ferocious. It is the story of a group of highly competitive and mutually suspicious dynasties, but also of a continent uniquely prone to interference from ´semi-detached´ elements, such as Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Britain and (just as centrally to Simms´s argument) the United States.

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Brendan Simms is a historian of unusual range and ability ... this book is driven by two great master-ideas, and there is hardly a page in it where their presence is not felt ... the reader always has the exhilarating sense of moving swiftly onwards, in a kind of turbocharged Rolls-Royce of historical argumentation ... truly powerful and original Noel Malcolm Telegraph

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Simms, Brendan
Brendan Simms is Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. His major books include Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize) and Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present, which was published in 2013 to extraordinary reviews.

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