Profiles in Power
In recent years historians have been preoccupied with broad questions of structure and process, and many have become suspicious of biography and the 'Great Man' approach to history.
On the other hand many students and readers continue to be drawn to history by an interest in individuals. This ambitious and wide-ranging series provides critical studies of key figures in international political history since 1500. The books are not biographies, though inevitably they contain much biographical material; rather they are succinct interpretative essays, analysing the major features of the career within the context of its own time.
Below are the titles in this series.
'Fidel Castro may have formally relinquished office but he still casts a long shadow over the Cuban revolution, and Sebastian Balfour succeeds in analysing both the man and his legac...
‘Geoffrey Swain has produced a robust, highly readable and fresh look at Trotsky that provides new insights into his personality, life, career and political ideas. Trotsk...
This profile looks at how Stalin, despite being regarded as intellectually inferior by his rivals, managed to rise to power and rule the largest country in the world, achievieving divine-lik...
Eisenhower is the president who established America as a superpower. He had already launched his reputation as the leading US military figure in the Second World War and then as supr...
Combining the latest insights from KIng biographies and movement histories, this book provides an up-to-date critical analysis of the relationship between King and the wider civil rights movement.&...
Covering a couple rather than a single, dominant ruler, Ferdinand and Isabella looks at the issue of gender and the dynamics of marriage over thirty-five years, as well as the practice of mo...
Bismarck was one of the single most important figures in German history. This new Profile evaluates his political career in the light of most recent considerations of his achievement...
An important addition to the Profiles in Power series, this critical biography looks at Franklin D. Roosevelt, the most dominant US politician of the 1930s and 1940s. Renshaw argues that Roo...
Ivan the Terrible
Maureen Perrie, Andrei Pavlov
Paperback, Aug 2003ISBN13: 9780582099487
ISBN10: 058209948X
This is the first major re-assessment of Ivan the Terrible to be published in the West in the post-Soviet period. It breaks away from older stereotypes of the tsar – whether as ‘crazed tyrant’ and...
Interest in the American Civil War and the role of Abraham Lincoln has grown dramatically in the last decade. Leader of the anti-slavery Republican coalition and the wartime Union, he has become...
It took a controversial monarch from outside Britain and Ireland to free the country from the chronic instability of Stuart Britain. This new portrait of William III tells us how and why....
From church establishment figure to revolutionary, supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte to promoter of the Bourbon Restoration, the twists and turns of Charles Maurice Prince de Talleyrand’s remarkable car...
Woodrow Wilson is one of the most significant figures of twentieth century history. This profile, which is based upon the recently-completed publication of the Wilson Papers, presents a fresh view...
Forced out of power in the"Glorious Revolution" of 1688, and defeated in the subsequent battle of the Boyne by William of Orange, the short reign of James II has an importance that reaches far b...
