The first full biography of the great Sun King of France since 1999, including recent discoveries and situating Louis XIV in a broader European context.
Philip Mansel is one of Britain's leading historians of France and the Middle East. His previous books include Louis XVIII, The Eagle in Splendour- Napoleon and his Court, The Court of France- 1789-1830, Paris Between Empires, 1814-1852 and Dressed to Rule- Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature, the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Asiatic Society, and he is President of the Conseil Scientifique at the Centre de Recherche du Ch teau de Versailles and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
the ultimate biography of the Sun King...a work of scholarly
analysis and flamboyant anecdotage, international conflict and
sexual politics
*BBC History Magazine*
A superb biography of Louis XIV by Philip Mansel, the best
non-French historian of France. Historical biography does not get
better than this
*The Week*
The life of the Sun King, under whom France founded colonies in
Africa, America and the East, is richly treated ... This nuanced
study makes you feel for the old monster.
*Daily Telegraph Books of the Year*
Mansel ... treads the line between the academic and the accessible
effectively ... No other English-language biography has so
successfully given us a portrait of him as man and monarch ... His
grasp of the sources is superb
*The Times*
A superb biography ... wonderfully detailed and fluent ... Huge
amounts of information have been digested ... Mansel is alive to
every nuance of rank and relation and a master of the mechanics of
life at Versailles and the other royal palaces. This mastery
naturally extends to dynastic relations and to the diplomatic
history of Louis's reign ... The portrait of Louis that emerges
from this titanic effort is compelling: a man of large appetites,
capable of intense affection and loyalty, vengeful, gracious, vain,
hard-working, hardened in the exercise of his own will, susceptible
to flattery, conceited in his isolation, capricious, unforgiving
and stubborn ... It seems hard to believe ... that this biography
will ever, in English at least, be surpassed.
*Oldie*
Almost everything about Louis XIV - the size of his palaces, the
length of his reign, the height of his heels - was on a gargantuan
scale. ... Such splendour is there not just to dazzle, but also to
deceive, and excavating the "real" Louis poses a major challenge
for any biography. Philip Mansel's impressive new survey - the best
single-volume account of the reign in any language - moves deftly
between these fictive and objective worlds. He revels in the fêtes
and fireworks, the frescoes and tapestries, that glorified Louis's
rule. But he is never blind to Louis' failings and absurdities, and
clearly delineates how the "absolute monarch" was never as absolute
as he wishes the world to think. ... Mansel brings this teeming,
sybaritic, ultra-competitive Versailles vividly to life
*Sunday Times*
Mansel is master of the well-chosen anecdote and of the pithy
summary. Interesting details sit comfortable within the big picture
that he portrays ... this is a scholarly, readable and impressively
wide-ranging account of the longest reign in history.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Excellent though Mansel is on the larger picture - you will find no
more comprehensive biography of this extraordinary monarch - his
genius lies in unpacking the complexities of Louis' royal
court.
*Financial Times*
Time and space both yield before Mansel's authorial ambition on
quite as vast a scale as Louis's own territorial, reputational,
amatory and gastronomic appetites.
*Daily Telegraph*
On a scale suitable to its subject, King of the World is in one way
an extended moral fable ... Mansel tells the story of these wars
fluently and fairly
*Spectator*
To do [Louis XIV] justice and encapsulate his person, his plans,
his successes and his failures, all which involved a dizzying cast
of characters and a mind-numbing web of relationships, is no easy
task. With his extensive studies of court ritual and his sympathy
for the Bourbons, Philip Mansel is the man for the job. ...
Mansel's descriptions of how Versailles functioned are masterful
and high-entertaining.
*Standpoint*
Mansel has mastered a bewildering array of primary and secondary
sources dealing with his man and his time period, and he's invested
his entire narrative with a kind of tightly compressed narrative
energy that has the most unlikely effect imaginable: it turns a
600-page biography of King Louis XIV into a genuine page-turner of
a reading experience. ...a genuinely impressive work...one of the
year's grandest biographies..
*Open Letters Review*
thorough, scholarly and fluent... breath-taking...
indispensable
*The Art Newspaper*
Philip Mansel's superb King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV
will become a classic. Magisterial and definitive, this is the
life's work of one of our leading historians.
*Spectator Books of the Year*
a magnificent study of the life of Louis XIV. He shaped his own age
and, partly because of some of his mistakes, helped to shape the
future of France as well.
*The Tablet Books of the Year*
A wonderfully meticulous look at Louis XIV (1638-1715) from a
leading historian of France. . . . An impressive, comprehensive
biography of the Sun King-a must-add to any Francophile's
library.
*Kirkus*
Philip Mansel's King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV is just a
masterwork and a superlative delight, written with sensitivity and
worldliness, political acuity and personal empathy all in Mansel's
usual elegant prose.
*Aspects of History Books of the Year*
Mansel is a welcome prize for any reviewer. You will have a
judicious guide, able to make well-founded assessments based not
only on an understanding of the archives and printed sources, their
riches and ambiguities, but also of the culture from which their
assumptions stem.
*The Critic*
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