In The Pursuit of Glory Tim Blanning brings to life one of the most extraordinary periods in Europe's history: from the desolate, battered and introverted continent of the end of the Thirty Years War to the overwhelmingly dynamic one that experienced the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon,

How did people really live their lives? How did they understand their world? What did they buy? What did they eat? How did they pray? What were their loyalties and their values?

From the lives of ordinary farmers and soldiers to great kings, princes and bishops and the dominant personalities of the age (Louis XIV, Frederick the Great, Napoleon); from art, leisure pursuits and garden design to the strange sport of fox-rossing, Blanning explores this era of immense change and cultural, political and technological ferment. This was a world in which the elite were obsessed with the pursuit of glory: their own glory, that of their families and that of their countries. It was a time of immense expenditure - as much on clothes, banquets and palaces as on fortresses and artillery - which shaped the societies and economies of entire countries.

The Pursuit of Glory is a major work by the period's leading historian and a rich and provocative evocation of a vivid and magnificent era in Europe's history.

Tim Blanning is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, He is also a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787-1802, The Origms of the French Revolutionary Wars, The French Revolation: Class War or Culture Clasb?, The French Revolution in Germany, Joseph II and Reform and Revolution in Maine