A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike.

Eventually you lose the will to continue. As you try and understand each carefully caveated sentence, paragraph and chapter the only clear thing is that Wilson has lost sight of the bigger picture. The reader gets so bogged down by detail this leads to information overload. But they are dense, dry and ultimately boring. These facts, as arrayed by Wilson, are undoubtedly impeccable. Instead he can only provide us with facts. He cannot edit his material down to support an intelligible and consistent argument. Unfortunately Peter Wilson cannot yet write good history. This is partly because McPherson is a great writer and economical editor. James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, a history of the US Civil War, is one of the best examples I have read. Military and diplomatic history, with its frequent conflicts, theoretically provides fruitful source material to create an engaging drama.

The principal actors in the drama (Wallenstein, Ferdinand II, Gustavus Adolphus, Richelieu) are all here, but so is the experience of the ordinary soldiers and civilians, desperately trying to stay alive under impossible circumstances. Wilson's great strength is in allowing the reader to understand the tragedy of mixed motives that allowed rulers to gamble their countries' future with such horrifying results. Peter Wilson's book is a major work, the first new history of the war in a generation, and a fascinating, brilliantly written attempt to explain a compelling series of events.

At its end a recognizably modern Europe had been created but at a terrible price. Whether motivated by idealism or cynicism, everyone drawn into the conflict was destroyed by it. The war was both a religious and a political one and it was this tangle of motives that made it impossible to stop. All the major European powers apart from Russia were heavily involved and, while each country started out with rational war aims, the fighting rapidly spiralled out of control, with great battles giving way to marauding bands of starving soldiers spreading plague and murder.

Winner of the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award 2011 The horrific series of conflicts known as the Thirty Years War (1618-48) tore the heart out of Europe, killing perhaps a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to whole areas of Central Europe to such a degree that many towns and regions never recovered.

The thirty years war europe's tragedy