If, like most people, you know little more about the Holy Roman Empire than Voltaire's bon mot–that it 'was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire'–then this is the book for you. In his masterly study of the original '1,000-year Reich' (Hitler's was merely a grotesque caricature), the Oxford professor Peter H. Wilson condenses a great deal of modern scholarship while wearing his learning lightly... Wilson's account is distinctive in treating the empire neither as a sequence of obstacles on the path to national self-determination, nor as a blueprint for the European Union. Instead, he seeks to understand how and why it worked.–Daniel Johnson "Sunday Times" (1/17/2016 12:00:00 AM)