In 1717, Frederick William, the king of Prussia, gave his 5-year-old son a full company of lead soldiers for Christmas. This was in keeping with the monarch’s insistence that the boy’s education should be guided by the principle that there is nothing in the world that bestows on a prince more fame and honor than the sword. But his son, who later would be called Frederick the Great, barely glanced at his father’s gift. Instead, as Tim Blanning writes in this fascinating new biography of the Prussian ruler, the little boy . . . turned away to a magnificently bound volume of French melodies and was soon entrancing his female audience with his lute. Blanning, a former professor of modern European history at Cambridge and prolific author, peppers his latest hefty volume with numerous revealing anecdotes of this ilk. As he points out, he has been studying Prussia’s most famous king for as long as I can remember. The result is a book that is both panoramic in scope and crammed full of often-petty rivalries and personal details, along with the seemingly incessant military campaigns. That can make for a dense narrative at times, but his subject defies easy characterization—or any categorization. Frederick, after all, has been portrayed as an enlightened ruler who disregarded many of the social conventions of his time, while he was later hailed by Hitler as one of his heroes, a leader who demonstrated the virtues of Prussian militarism and discipline.

Source: Old Fritz | The Weekly Standard