Geoffrey Parker is a Reader in Modern History at the University of St Andrews.
This book, French readers were told one month before its publication last January, ‘is already the intellectual event of 1980’. As if in answer, the first printing of 9,000 copies of the three-volume set, each containing 1,751 pages and weighing ten pounds, sold out within three weeks. At almost £50 per set, Civilisation Matérielle seems likely to prove the commercial event of 1980.
The English had more ‘ship-smashing’ guns, more experienced gunners, better powder and more standardised shot. (The ‘Spanish’ Armada used pieces from foundries all over Europe, each with different...
As he lay on his deathbed at Yuste, Charles seemed to have found an unaccustomed ease: dying monarchs were more often to be found scrabbling remorsefully to make peace with their subjects and their maker....
Contemporary accounts leave little ambiguity about the character of the 17th century. Natural disasters, warfare, political unrest and rebellion combined to bring about levels of mortality,...
‘In war,’ Napoleon said, ‘moral considerations make up three-quarters of the game: the relative balance of manpower accounts only for the remaining quarter.’ Just one of...
All these books are concerned with what the Spaniards once called the Felicissima Armada and what the English still, with a quiet smile, call the Invincible Armada (apparently it was Burleigh who...
Geoffrey Parker’s new book on the Thirty Years’ War is the first major study of the subject to appear in English for nearly half a century. To be more exact, it is now 47 years since...
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