Frederick the Great

Fülszöveg

After her enormously successful biographical studies of The Sun King and Madame de Pompadour. Nancy Mitford now turns tea less familiar but no less fascinating figure. Frederick the Great. She says she has never liked a subject for biography so much, and her enthusiasm for the Prussian king and his world is evident throughout this lively, illuminating and often moving record of the life of a very remarkable man.
Frederick was a complex man, not merely a brilliant military strategist and statesman, but also a scholar, musician and patron of the arts. He has nearly always been either praised or blamed too much by his biographers, but Miss Mitford has tried to present the known facts objectively, though with her characteristic humour, drawing almost all of her material from contemporary sources. She describes Frederick's dreadful childhood, his years of solitary study at Rheinsberg. his relationship with his friends, who were nearly all Frenchmen, and with the members of his large... Tovább

Fülszöveg

After her enormously successful biographical studies of The Sun King and Madame de Pompadour. Nancy Mitford now turns tea less familiar but no less fascinating figure. Frederick the Great. She says she has never liked a subject for biography so much, and her enthusiasm for the Prussian king and his world is evident throughout this lively, illuminating and often moving record of the life of a very remarkable man.
Frederick was a complex man, not merely a brilliant military strategist and statesman, but also a scholar, musician and patron of the arts. He has nearly always been either praised or blamed too much by his biographers, but Miss Mitford has tried to present the known facts objectively, though with her characteristic humour, drawing almost all of her material from contemporary sources. She describes Frederick's dreadful childhood, his years of solitary study at Rheinsberg. his relationship with his friends, who were nearly all Frenchmen, and with the members of his large and interesting family. She races through his military campaigns, giving the salient facts of the highly picturesque battles, and she unravels the complicated diplotnacy which he conducted with such regrettable bad faith but which led eventually to a united Germany dominated by Prussia.
^ As always in her writing she aims at a brilliant sketch of the personality rather than the full-length oil painting, and she also tries to present him in the context of his own environment. Frederick the Great is a historical oddity who lends himself to this treatment, and Miss Mitford's account of him may well be considered her best book yet.
The book is illustrated with forty-eight superb colour plates, including specially commissioned photographs of the rococo splendours of Frederick's palaces. Numerous monochrome illustrations complement the text and include much hitherto unpublished material from sources in Eastern Europe.
11 Vissza