Easy to read but the author devotes too many pages speculating on Frederick's sexuality (something which we will not have a definite answer anyway as Frederick is dead already and cannot confirm or deny the author's speculations) rather than focusing his narration of Frederick's life on his actions as a ruler of Prussia and his conduct of diplomacy and war. ( )

Frederick the Great is one of those endlessly contradictory figures, who can be roped in to justify almost any theory of history: enlightened authoritarian, populist aesthete, atheist champion of the "protestant cause", German nationalist icon who despised the German language and its culture, the military genius who lost as many battles as he won, and the man who launched the unprovoked invasion of a neighbouring territory three months after publishing an anti-war book.

Blanning's strategy in this fascinating biography seems to be to embrace the contradictions without taking sides, as far as that's possible, and to look into the separate strains in Frederick's political and personal situation that were pushing him in these opposing directions. Key, of course, is Frederick's terrible relationship with his father: ruthlessly bullied up to the moment Frederick William died, he enthusiastically took up everything his father hated: art, music, clothes, porcelain, philosophy, free-thinking (and conversely, he took against hunting, drinking, and heterosexuality...). But, thanks to his father's philistinism, he had a very poor education, with all kinds of gaps that couldn't easily be filled later in life. And, in an age when great powers like France and Austria were virtually bankrupt, he had inherited a huge, low-mileage army and enormous piles of hard cash that the miserly Frederick William hadn't had any interest in spending. It would have needed a lot of willpower not to start at least a small war, and the strategically vital Austrian province of Silesia seemed to be there for the taking...

We are led fairly efficiently through the many conflicts of the Silesian wars, the Seven Years War, and the Bavarian Succession, although it's pretty clear that Blanning's first interest is not military history: he conscientiously gives us a sketch-map of each of the important battles, but rarely describes them in the sort of detail that would make a map useful. The diplomacy and strategic manoeuvring in the background is much more fascinating than the battlefield action, but it does become clear that Frederick was better at emotional leadership than at battlefield tactics. When he won a battle he got all the credit because he was so much admired by his subordinates (if not by his fellow-generals). And when he didn't win, he often managed to limit the damage by moving more quickly and decisively after the battle than his opponents.

The more interesting part of the book deals with cultural and social issues. The interesting puzzle of how Berlin-Potsdam failed to become a really important musical centre, despite having a ruler who was a talented and enthusiastic musician. Mannheim and Vienna were the real musical hotspots of the time, with London not far behind. Blanning gives a lot of the blame for that to Frederick's micro-management, and to his tastes that were frozen somewhere in the 1730s. Innovative musicians would have been permanently at war with him, and word soon got around that he didn't take kindly to anyone who wanted to move on to a better-paid post elsewhere. If you were a talented soprano (or a French philosophe) you might well find a Berlin Wall restricting your movements well before 1960. So he was left with competent but not top-flight musicians, like J J Quantz and C P E Bach.

Language is the really odd thing: Frederick seems to have treated his native language in much the same way that 19th century colonial administrators thought of African and Asian languages: useful for giving orders and condescending to the locals, but scarcely a medium for high culture. French was insisted on for official business, and was the language Frederick wrote his many books and poems in — one of the causes of his famous row with Voltaire was his expectation that the great man would be willing to act as his spelling-checker. At a moment when all Europe was rushing out to buy copies of Werther (and the fancy-dress to go with it), Frederick was publishing a pamphlet arguing that it was impossible for German culture to match the achievements of French and Italian. Lessing, the most distinguished Prussian writer of the time, whom Frederick took even less notice of than he did of Goethe, charitably suggested that Frederick's highly-publicised contempt actually encouraged German writers to try harder.

Of course, the thing we really want from a 21st century biography of Frederick is to follow him into the bedroom! Blanning admits that there's no likelihood now that we will ever get conclusive information about Frederick's real sexual preferences from someone who was there at the time, but decides on the basis of the huge amount of circumstantial evidence (from the all-male parties and homoerotic artworks at Sanssouci to Frederick's abandonment of the pretence of living with his wife the moment his father was out of the way) that it's silly to try to represent him as heterosexual, as many earlier historians have done.

Very readable and interesting biography. ( )

The iconic biography in English it may be, but so much less engaging than his excellent books on Glory and on Music. This took months to read and I was really grateful for the 160 pages of notes as they suddenly ended the tome. I read it all because it was so expensive to purchase. The maps are execrable. You need your own. Not a nice person. Enlightened autocracy is shown to be overrated. ( )

Frederick the Great King of Prussia, by Tim Blanning (read 10 Aug 2016) Even though I read on 15 May 1972 Ludwig Reimers' biograph of Frederick the Great and on 4 June 1987 I read Robert B. Asprey's biography of him, I hve now read this 2016 biography by a Cambridge historian. Blanning spends a lot more time on Frederick's probable homosexuality than did the othe two biographies I read, but he also covers the life and Frederick's exploits in full. Some of the accoun is pretty dry, but the account of the Seven Years War is well done. The book has 105 pages of notes and six pages of a list for "Further Reading" (though neither of the old biographies I have read is suggested as other reading). The book did not make me admratory of Frederick--in fact some of what Frederick thought and did suggested why Hitler admired him, his anti-Semitism, his animus against religion, etc. ( )

Frederick the Great King of Prussia by Tim Blanning is a stunning book. Blanning , a professor of mine when I was at Cambridge, has given us the definitive biography of Frederick the Great. I think of Nancy Mitford's biography but I find this one more substantial. For a student of German history this is a must. ( )