Vanished Kingdoms

From Norman Davies, the acclaimed author of "Europe: A History", comes the magical history of Europe's lost realms, selected as a Book of the Year by the "Sunday Times", "Daily Telegraph", "New Statesman", "Independent", "Guardian" and "Financial Times". Europe's history is littered with kingdoms, duchies, empires and republics which have now disappeared but which were once fixtures on the map of their age. What happened to the once-great Mediterranean 'Empire of Aragon'? Where did the half-forgotten kingdoms of Burgundy go? Which current nations will one day become a distant memory too? This original and enthralling book peers through the cracks of history to discover the stories of lost realms across the centuries. "Dazzling, provocative and brilliant". (Dominic Sandbrook, "Sunday Times", Books of the Year). "A luminous account ...there are few better ways of understanding the multilayered splendours and horrors of Europe's past than through the pages of this wise, humane and unfailingly engaging book". (John Adamson, "Sunday Telegraph"). ""Vanished Kingdoms" is great history and also great art. It is written with verve, passion and profound empathy". (David Marquand, "New Statesman", Books of the Year). "A magnificent achievement. Brocaded with scholarship, the book is unlikely ever to be equalled". (Ian Thomson, "Independent").

"Hugely ambitious . . . From the mists, Mr. Davies summons the kingdoms; he records their emergence, their flowering and their demise--whether by 'internall diseases' or 'forraign warre' in Thomas Hobbes's words. And he examines the traces that the kingdoms have left behind, in works of art or a piece of rock or perhaps just a place name."--"The Wall Street Journal"

Norman Davies is the author of the No 1 best-seller Europe: a History (1996), Microcosm: Portrait of a European City (with Roger Moorhouse) and Rising '44: the Battle for Warsaw (date). From 1997-2006 he was Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford; he is now Professor at the Jagiellonian University at Cracow, an Honorary Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford and a life member of Clare Hall and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and lives in Oxford and Cracow.

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