The personality and position of Karl Kautsky puts his unique book in the front rank of authoritative records, and settles, once for all, the question of the personal responsibility of William Hohenzollern for the outbreak of the Great War. Appointed by the German Republican Government to examine the secret archives of the German Foreign Office, Kautsky was able to study the documents which passed between the German authorities and the other parties to the great conspiracy, documents which passed through the hands of the ex-Kaiser and bear his notes and comments, which showed William Hohenzollern as the driving force behind the war-party in Germany, as a man determined not to let slip what seemed so favorable an opportunity of settling accounts with Russia — and, if necessary, the world.

Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941) ruled Imperial Germany from his accession in 1888 to his enforced abdication in 1918 at the end of the First World War. This book, based on a wealth of previously unpublished archival material, provides the most detailed account ever written of the first half of his reign. Following on from John Röhl's definitive and highly acclaimed Young Wilhelm: The Kaiser's Early Life, 1859-1888 (1998), the volume demonstrates the monarch's dynastic arrogance and the wounding abuse he showered on his own people as, step by step, he built up his personal power. His thirst for glory, his overweening nationalism and militarism and his passion for the navy provided the impetus for a breathtaking long-term goal: the transformation of the German Reich into the foremost power in the world. Urgent warnings from all sides, both against the revival of a semi-absolute Personal Monarchy on the threshold to the twentieth century and against the challenge his goal of 'world power' implied for the existing World Powers Great Britain, France and Russia were brushed aside by the impetuous young ruler with his faithful military retinue and blindly devoted court favourites. Soon the predicted consequences - constitutional crisis at home and diplomatic isolation abroad - began to make their alarming appearance.

The first monograph to treat comprehensively the epoch-making though now too often forgotten scandal that rocked German political culture from 1906 to 1909, now in English translation.

'Of the "Great Powers" that dominated Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, Prussia is the only one to have vanished ... Iron Kingdom is not just good: it is everything a history book ought to be ... The nemesis of Prussia has cast such a long shadow that German historians have tiptoed around the subject. Thus it was left to an Englishman to write what is surely the best history of Prussia in any language' Sunday Telegraph

The first ever in-depth study of the role played by the nobility in the Nazi rise to power in interwar Germany, this is a fascinating portrait of an aristocratic world teetering on the edge of self-destruction.

A personal and political analysis of the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II using new archival sources.

In the years before World War I, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II. Carter uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell their tragicomic stories.