Fighting for a New World 1848-1849

Revolutionary Spring

'One of the best history books you will read this decade' History Today 
 
'Fascinating, suspenseful, revelatory, alive' The Times 
 
There can be few more exciting or frightening moments in European history than the spring of 1848. As if by magic, in city after city, from Palermo to Paris to Venice, huge crowds gathered, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent, and the political order that had held sway since the defeat of Napoleon simply collapsed. 
 
Christopher Clark's spectacular new book recreates with verve, wit and insight this extraordinary period. Some rulers gave up at once, others fought bitterly, but everywhere new politicians, beliefs and expectations surged forward. The role of women in society, the end of slavery, the right to work, national independence and the emancipation of the Jews all became live issues. 
 
Clark conjures up both this ferment of new ideas and then the increasingly ruthless and effective series of counter-attacks launched by regimes who still turned out to have many cards to play. But even in defeat, exiles spread the ideas of 1848 around the world and - for better and sometimes much worse - a new and very different Europe emerged from the wreckage.

Magnificent, authoritative and deeply-researched... a supreme work of scholarship.

Clark has achieved the impossible: a synoptic history of a subject which defies synopsis... this is history on an epic scale... a masterpiece and one of the best history books you will read this decade.

Refreshingly original... it's fascinating, suspenseful, revelatory, alive. Familiar characters are given vibrancy and previously unknown players emerge from the shadows.. Clark's prose is beautiful but also crystal clear

Magnificent... does a remarkable job weaving together the myriad strands that make up the narrative, allowing us to see the events in granular detail and with synoptic, Europe-wide vision.

Full of characters, colour and story, but also makes the arresting case that the revolutions ... changed Europe and the world in ways felt to this day... the history teacher you wished you'd had.

A marvel of research and analysis. No corner of Europe, from the Ukrainian borderlands to the Greek islands, escapes his gaze.. a titanic monument to historical scholarship.

Exhilarating, heroic, horrifying and tragic, the events of the mid-19th century in Europe invite a good retelling ... Christopher Clark's new book is, arguably, the best to date ... deeply researched, rich, engaging and though-provoking. There is now no better place to turn for readers who want to immerse themselves in this period and to reflect on how it resonates today.

Thrills with unexpected energy ... this is narrative history in the grand style ... superb.

An engrossing dissection of a revolutionary year in European society.

Scintillating ... [a] magnificent chronicle of the events leading up to and beyond 1848 ... he tackles the complexity by giving sufficient space to the often thrilling stories of every uprising.

Magnificent ... Sophisticated analysis and beautiful prose ... The author vividly depicts a Europe grasping toward the future.

Combines over-arching analysis and explanation with a ground-level reporter&rsquo;s skill at narrating events and capturing character with vividness and compassion &hellip; a historian working at the height of his powers.

Christopher Clark is the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He was knighted in 2015. His previous books are The Politics of Conversion, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Iron Kingdom, The Sleepwalkers, Time and Power and Prisoners of Time.

There can be few more exciting or frightening moments in European history than the spring of 1848. As if by magic, in city after city, from Palermo to Paris, huge crowds gathered, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent, and the political order that had held sway since the defeat of Napoleon simply collapsed. 
 
Christopher Clark's spectacular new book recreates with verve, wit and insight this extraordinary period. Some rulers gave up at once, others fought bitterly, but everywhere new politicians, beliefs and expectations surged forward. The role of women in society, the end of slavery, the right to work, national independence and the emancipation of the Jews all became live issues. 
 
Clark conjures up both this ferment of new ideas and then the increasingly ruthless series of counter-attacks launched by regimes who still turned out to have many cards to play. But even in defeat, exiles spread the ideas of 1848 around the world and - for better and sometimes much worse - a new and very different Europe emerged from the wreckage.

Prussians, Germans and Other Humans

Prisoners of Time

An intellectual tour de force: the major essays of the esteemed author of international bestseller The Sleepwalkers 
 
 Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers has become one of the most influential history books of our century: a remarkable rethinking of the origins of the First World War, which has had a huge impact on how we see both the past and the present. 
 
 For the many readers who found the narrative voice, craftsmanship and originality of Clark's writing so compelling, Prisoners of Time will be a book filled with surprises and enjoyment. Bringing together many of Clark's major essays, Prisoners of Time raises a host of questions about how we think about the past, and both the value and pitfalls of history as a discipline. 
 
 The book includes brilliant writing on German subjects: from assessments of Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck to the painful story of General von Blaskowitz, a traditional Prussian military man who accommodated himself to the horrors of the Third Reich. There is a fascinating essay on attempts to convert Prussian Jews to Christianity, and insights into everything from Brexit to the significance of battles. Perhaps the most important piece in the book is 'The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar', a virtuoso meditation on the nature of political power down the ages, which will become essential reading for anyone drawn to the meaning of history.

A bravura examination of political power ... Clark displays [his] brilliance and bracing intellect to exhilarating effect ... The pleasure of Clark's writing is that it embraces an impressive spectrum of thought, without ever losing sight of the historical truth, or of the difficulty in reaching it.

A resounding success ... [Clark] has a knack for writing accounts of the past that make waves in the present. In Prisoners of Time, Clark brings the same complexity to the subject of history itself ... Erudite.

Christopher Clark is the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He was knighted in 2015. He is the author of The Politics of Conversion, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Iron Kingdom, The Sleepwalkers and Time and Power and is currently writing a history of the revolutions of 1848.

Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers has become one of the most influential history books of our century: a remarkable rethinking of the origins of the First World War, which has had a huge impact on how we see both the past and the present. 
 
 For the many readers who found the narrative voice, craftsmanship and originality of Clark's writing so compelling, Prisoners of Time will be a book filled with surprises and enjoyment. Bringing together many of Clark's major essays, Prisoners of Time raises a host of questions about how we think about the past, and both the value and pitfalls of history as a discipline. 
 
 The book includes brilliant writing on German subjects: from assessments of Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck to the painful story of General von Blaskowitz, a military man who accommodated himself to the horrors of the Third Reich. There is a fascinating essay on attempts to convert Prussian Jews to Christianity, and insights into everything from Brexit to the significance of battles. Perhaps the most important piece in the book is 'The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar', a virtuoso meditation on the nature of political power down the ages, which will become essential reading for anyone drawn to the meaning of history.

How Europe Went to War in 1914

The Sleepwalkers

The pacy, sensitive and formidably argued history of the causes of the First World War, from acclaimed historian and author Christopher Clark 
 
FINANCIAL TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014 
SUNDAY TIMES and INDEPENDENT BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2012 
Winner of the Los Angeles Times History Book Prize 2014 
 
The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car and shoot dead Franz Ferdinand and his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the modern era. An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency, it fulfilled its every aim: it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule and it created a powerful new Serbia, but it also brought down four great empires, killed millions of men and destroyed a civilization. What made a seemingly prosperous and complacent Europe so vulnerable to the impact of this assassination? 
 
In The Sleepwalkers Christopher Clark retells the story of the outbreak of the First World War and its causes. Above all, it shows how the failure to understand the seriousness of the chaotic, near genocidal fighting in the Balkans would drag Europe into catastrophe. 
 
Reviews: 
 
'Formidable ... one of the most impressive and stimulating studies of the period ever published' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 
 
'Easily the best book ever written on the subject ... A work of rare beauty that combines meticulous research with sensitive analysis and elegant prose. The enormous weight of its quality inspires amazement and awe ... Academics should take note: Good history can still be a good story' Washington Post 
 
'A lovingly researched work of the highest scholarship. It is hard to believe we will ever see a better narrative of what was perhaps the biggest collective blunder in the history of international relations' Niall Ferguson 
 
'[Reading The Sleepwalkers], it is as if a light had been turned on a half-darkened stage of shadowy characters cursing among themselves without reason ... [Clark] demolishes the standard view ... The brilliance of Clark's far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue ... In conception, steely scholarship and piercing insights, his book is a masterpiece' Harold Evans, New York Times Book Review 
 
'Impeccably researched, provocatively argued and elegantly written ... a model of scholarship' Sunday Times Books of the Year 
 
'Superb ... effectively consigns the old historical consensus to the bin ... It's not often that one has the privilege of reading a book that reforges our understanding of one of the seminal events of world history' Mail Online 
 
'A monumental new volume ... Revelatory, even revolutionary ... Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable' Boston Globe 
 
'Superb ... One of the great mysteries of history is how Europe's great powers could have stumbled into World War I ... This is the single best book I have read on this important topic' Fareed Zakaria 
 
'A meticulously researched, superbly organized, and handsomely written account' Military History 
 
'Clark is a masterly historian ... His account vividly reconstructs key decision points while deftly sketching the context driving them ... A magisterial work' Wall Street Journal 
 
'This compelling examination of the causes of World War I deserves to become the new standard one-volume account of that contentious subject' Foreign Affairs 
 
'A brilliant contribution' Times Higher Education 
 
'Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject ... He provides vivid portraits of leading figures ... [He] also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war' Irish Times 
 
'In recent decades, many analysts had tended to put most blame for the disaster [of the First World War] on Germany. Clark strongly renews an older interpretation which sees the statesmen of many countries as blundering blindly together into war' Stephen Howe, Independent Books of the Year 
 
About the author: 
 
Christopher Clark is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. He is the author of The Politics of Conversion, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Iron Kingdom. Widely praised around the world, Iron Kingdom became a major bestseller. He has been awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Formidable ... one of the most impressive and stimulating studies of the period ever published

Easily the best book ever written on the subject ... A work of rare beauty that combines meticulous research with sensitive analysis and elegant prose. The enormous weight of its quality inspires amazement and awe ... Academics should take note: Good history can still be a good story

A lovingly researched work of the highest scholarship. It is hard to believe we will ever see a better narrative of what was perhaps the biggest collective blunder in the history of international relations

[Reading The Sleepwalkers], it is as if a light had been turned on a half-darkened stage of shadowy characters cursing among themselves without reason ... [Clark] demolishes the standard view ... The brilliance of Clark's far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue ... In conception, steely scholarship and piercing insights, his book is a masterpiece

Impeccably researched, provocatively argued and elegantly written ... a model of scholarship

Superb ... effectively consigns the old historical consensus to the bin ... It's not often that one has the privilege of reading a book that reforges our understanding of one of the seminal events of world history

A monumental new volume ... Revelatory, even revolutionary ... Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable

Superb ... One of the great mysteries of history is how Europe's great powers could have stumbled into World War I ... This is the single best book I have read on this important topic

A meticulously researched, superbly organized, and handsomely written account

Clark is a masterly historian ... His account vividly reconstructs key decision points while deftly sketching the context driving them ... A magisterial work

This compelling examination of the causes of World War I deserves to become the new standard one-volume account of that contentious subject

Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject ... He provides vivid portraits of leading figures ... [He] also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war

In recent decades, many analysts had tended to put most blame for the disaster [of the First World War] on Germany. Clark strongly renews an older interpretation which sees the statesmen of many countries as blundering blindly together into war

Christopher Clark is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. He is the author of The Politics of Conversion, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Iron Kingdom. Widely praised around the world, Iron Kingdom became a major bestseller. He has been awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Sleepwalkers was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize, and is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, French Prix Aujourd¹hui, Cundill Recognition of Excellence Prize, Bruno Kreisky Prize for Political Literature and the Braunschweiger Geschichtspreis.

A Life in Power

Kaiser Wilhelm II

Christopher Clark's Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power is a short, fascinating and accessible biography of one of the 20th century's most important figures. 
 
King of Prussia, German Emperor, war leader and defeated exile, Kaiser Wilhelm II was one of the most important - and most controversial - figures in the history of twentieth-century Europe. But how much power did he really have? 
Christopher Clark, winner of the Wolfson prize for his history of Prussia, Iron Kingdom, follows Kaiser Wilhelm's political career from his youth at the Hohenzollern court through the turbulent decades of the Wilhelmine era into global war and the collapse of Germany in 1918, to his last days. He asks: what was his true role in the events that led to the outbreak of the First World War? What was the nature and extent of his control? What were his political goals and his success in achieving them? How did he project authority and exercise influence? And how did his people really view him? 
 
Through original research, Clark presents a fresh new interpretation of this contentious figure, focusing on how his thirty-year reign from 1888 to 1918 affected Germany, and the rest of Europe, for years to come. 
 
 'Clark's fresh and enlightening history brings the Kaiser's life into critical and illuminating review' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;German History 
 
 Christopher Clark is a lecturer in Modern European History at St Catharine's College, University of Cambridge. His book Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600 to 1947 was the winner of the Wolfson Prize for History.

Clark's fresh and enlightening history ... brings the Kaiser's life into critical and illuminating review

Christopher Clark is a lecturer in Modern European History at St Catharine's College, University of Cambridge. His book Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600 to 1947 was the winner of the Wolfson Prize for History.

King of Prussia, German Emperor, war leader and defeated exile, Kaiser Wilhelm II was one of the most important - and most controversial - figures in the history of twentieth-century Europe. But how much power did he really have? 
 
The acclaimed historian Christopher Clark follows Kaiser Wilhelm's political career from his youth at the Hohenzollern court through the turbulent decades of the Wilhelmine era into global war and the collapse of Germany in 1918, to his last days. He asks: what was his true role in the events that led to the outbreak of the First World War? What was the nature and extent of his control? What were his political goals and his success in achieving them? How did he project authority and exercise influence? How did the people view him? 
 
Through original research, Clark presents a fresh new interpretation of this contentious figure, focusing on how his forty-year reign from 1888 to 1918 affected Germany, and the rest of Europe, for years to come.

The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947

Iron Kingdom

Winner of the Wolfson History Prize

Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947 is a compelling account of a country that played a pivotal role in Europe's fortunes and fundamentally shaped our world. 
 
 Prussia began as a medieval backwater, but transformed itself into a major European power and the force behind the creation of the German empire, until it was finally abolished by the Allies after the Second World War. 
 
 With great flair and authority, Christopher Clark describes Prussia's great battles, dynastic marriages and astonishing reversals of fortune, its brilliant and charismatic leaders from the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg to Bismarck and Frederick the Great, the military machine and the progressive, enlightened values on which it was built. 
 
 'Fascinating ... masterly ... littered with intriguing detail and wry observation' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Richard Overy, Daily Telegraph 
 
 'A terrific book ... the definitive history of this much-maligned state' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Daily Telegraph Books of the Year 
 
 'You couldn't have the triumph and the tragedy of Prussia better told' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Observer 
 
 'A magisterial history of Europe's only extinct power' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Financial Times 
 
 'Exemplary ... an illuminating, profoundly satisfying work of history' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The New York Times 
 
 Christopher Clark is a lecturer in Modern European History at St Catharine's College, University of Cambridge. He is also the author of Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power.

Christopher Clark is a lecturer in Modern European History at St Catharine's College, University of Cambridge. His previous book was a biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

'Of the "Great Powers" that dominated Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, Prussia is the only one to have vanished ... Iron Kingdom is not just good: it is everything a history book ought to be ... The nemesis of Prussia has cast such a long shadow that German historians have tiptoed around the subject. Thus it was left to an Englishman to write what is surely the best history of Prussia in any language' Sunday Telegraph

Christopher Clark

At first glance the story of an obscure sex scandal among an evangelical sect in 19th-century Prussia might seem a bit slight. But Christopher Clark, one of our greatest historians, uses it as the hook for a haunting reflection on the power of gossip, fake news and social conformity. Sketching the world of Königsberg with tremendous empathy, he gives us an unforgettable range of characters, from the androgynous preacher Johann Ebel to the splendidly named Count Finck von Finckenstein

It takes a confident historian to write a short book… the story is distilled to its powerful essence; he knows precisely what’s important… This small book is many things, but for me what shines brightest is a tale of two renegade preachers who understood women and love

An exquisite work of micro-history that deserves its place on the shelf beside such classics as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976) and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre

Clark writes with his characteristic clarity and wit. This carefully researched microhistory clearly echoes our own time

A Scandal in Königsberg may be a miniature, but it is far from insubstantial... fans of tales of clerical skulduggery, of German history in general and culture wars avant la Bismarckian lettre in particular, plus anyone interested in how intolerance ruins lives, will enjoy Clark’s latest, not least because it is ‘short and lively” just like Frederick the Great’s ideal wars

A splendid exercise in historical recuperation. It illustrates the confusions, uncertainties and prejudices of a period when the horrors of revolution and warfare were still vivid in the European memory, and men and women were desperately searching for ordinary, lower-case enlightenment and spiritual guidance

The rise of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ in our own time… lend the story revealed by the files in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv an unexpected contemporary relevance … Clark tells this engrossing story with all his usual narrative verve and stylistic brilliance

Königsberg (is) a kind of Prussian Atlantis, a quasi-mythical place everyone gets to build in their own imagination without reality getting in the way… What makes Clark’s telling so effective is the way he brings this seemingly obscure episode to life without ever overplaying its strangeness

Clark uses a scandal that befell Königsberg in the 1830s to tell a story of Europe and religion and the battle between reason and imagination. Everything here is extraordinary… Clark has tremendous fun in this setting, and not just because of its soap opera-ish potential

Clark’s narrative impressively interweaves the stories of the men and women drawn into Ebel’s circle with the political, religious and intellectual upheavals of the time

Its plot of history is small, but its horizons are enormous

Now part of the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, the former Prussian and German port of Königsberg has always been a somewhat sleepy place, doomed to be famous for having once been the residence of Immanuel Kant. But in the late 1830s, just for a short while, it became famous for all the wrong reasons.Christopher Clark’s brilliant new book is the result of many years of fascination with this strange case. Sensational accusations were bandied about, implying that beneath the town’s somnolent surface there were dark erotic currents and wrenching betrayals of trust. For the Prussian authorities this was just the sort of moral collapse they feared most. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which had unsettled a generation, every lapse could be seen as the harbinger of new storms.A Scandal in Königsberg beautifully brings to life a time and a place that we would now situate in the tranquil ‘Biedermeier’ years between the seismic upheavals of the 1810s and 1840s. But there is a timeless quality to this small vortex of turbulence, in which spiritual hunger, vanity, professional rivalry, sexual incontinence, naivety and sheer human waywardness threatened to tear a city apart.

Christopher Clark

Praise for A Scandal in Königsberg

At first glance the story of an obscure sex scandal among an evangelical sect in 19th-century Prussia might seem a bit slight. But Christopher Clark, one of our greatest historians, uses it as the hook for a hauntin ...

It takes a confident historian to write a short book… the story is distilled to its powerful essence; he knows precisely what’s important… This small book is many things, but for me what shines brightest is a tale o ...

An exquisite work of micro-history that deserves its place on the shelf beside such classics as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976) and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre

At first glance the story of an obscure sex scandal among an evangelical sect in 19th-century Prussia might seem a bit slight. But Christopher Clark, one of our greatest historians, uses it as the hook for a hauntin ...

It takes a confident historian to write a short book… the story is distilled to its powerful essence; he knows precisely what’s important… This small book is many things, but for me what shines brightest is a tale o ...

An exquisite work of micro-history that deserves its place on the shelf beside such classics as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976) and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre

At first glance the story of an obscure sex scandal among an evangelical sect in 19th-century Prussia might seem a bit slight. But Christopher Clark, one of our greatest historians, uses it as the hook for a hauntin ...

It takes a confident historian to write a short book… the story is distilled to its powerful essence; he knows precisely what’s important… This small book is many things, but for me what shines brightest is a tale o ...

An exquisite work of micro-history that deserves its place on the shelf beside such classics as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976) and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre

Books by Christopher Clark

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter