The birth of the modern: World society 1815 - 1830 - Paul Johnson (First edition)

The Birth of the Modern is a new kind of historical work – an examination of the way the matrix of the modern world was formed. Paul Johnson, one of today's most popular historians, takes fifteen critical years and subjects them to a fascinatingly detailed examination: their geopolitics and politics, their cultural and intellectual life, their technology, economics and science. He investigates every area of life, in every corner of the world. And he makes of this huge variety of elements a coherent narrative, told through the lives and actual words of the age's people – outstanding and ordinary – so that the reader feels he was there.

The years after Waterloo were some of the most crowded in history. They were the years of Wellington and General Jackson, Davy, Faraday and Brunel, Bolivar and Raffles, Constable and Turner, Delacroix and Géricault, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, Hugo, Kierkegaard and Hegel, Jane Austen and George Sand, Beethoven and Frankenstein.

This magisterial book is Paul Johnson at his finest. It is a book which only he would have dared to embark on, and which only he could have so triumphantly succeeded in writing.