Free Invitation: Jonathan Steinberg on Bismarck

Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg was shortlisted for the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize.

Otto Von Bismarck is one of the more arresting figures of the nineteenth century, who dominated continental politics and was a driving force behind German unification. Cambridge academic Jonathan Steinberg’s fabulous Samuel Johnson Prize shortlisted biography offers a fresh perspective on the Iron Chancellor through the eyes of his secretaries, his old friends, his neighbours, his enemies and the press.

A political genius who combined creative and destructive traits, generosity and pettiness, tolerance and ferocious enmity, courtesy and rudeness – in short, not only the most important nineteenth-century statesman but by far the most entertaining.