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‘The dilemma created by the United States’ relative decline and continuing world-wide military commitments is brilliantly analysed. … Kennedy’s analysis has caught the American imagination because of his ability to interpret both current problems and future trends in an historical perspective stretching back half a millennium to the end of the Middle Ages. … The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is one of the masterpieces of modern historical writing. It is also a striking vindication of the often neglected truth that the only way to understand the present is to understand the past.’

CHRISTOPHER ANDREW, Daily Telegraph

‘The reader must savour the argument – illustrated by successive Habsburg, French and German bids for European hegemony, as well as by the rise and fall of the Pax Britannica – in all its historical richness. I doubt whether the story of the rise and fall of the great powers has ever been told so professionally, with such a command of sources, or with such close attention to the connections between economics, geography and politics.’

ROBERT SKIDELSKY, Independent

‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is a powerful work of history. It is not glib or polemical … it is enormously learned. Its relatively few predictions are made with appropriate modesty. It has the capacity to make an immensely important contribution to both public debate and private thinking about the policy dilemmas currently facing the United States and the world, which makes the attention it has received particularly heartening.

‘But this is an important book, too, for its relationship to the prevailing norms of historical scholarship and for the ways in which it simultaneously reflects and defies those norms. …

‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is not a conventionally entertaining book, despite its surprising popularity. It is not comforting. It is merely invaluable.’

ALAN BRINKLEY, TLS

‘In a work of almost Toynbeean sweep he describes a pattern of past development that is not only directly relevant to our time but is clearly intended to be read by policy makers. … When a scholar as careful and learned as Mr Kennedy is prompted by contemporary issues to reexamine the great processes of the past, the result can only be an enhancement of our historical understanding and a fresh enlightenment of the problems of our own time. Further, when the study is written as simply and attractively as this work is, its publication may have a great and beneficient impact.’

MICHAEL HOWARD, New York Times Book Review

Important, learned and lucid … Paul Kennedy’s great achievement is that he makes us see our current international problems against a background of empires that have gone under because they were unable to sustain the material cost of greatness; and he does so in a universal historical perspective of which Ranke would surely have approved.’

JAMES JOLL, New York Review of Books

‘This continually stimulating and wonderfully ambitious book throws as sharp a light on the present as it does on the past.’

ZARA STEINER, Financial Times

‘It is, I hope, a tribute to Kennedy’s range and attention to specific that my notes on his book extend to ten single-spaced foolscap pages. He manages to be both humane and unsentimental.’

FREDERIC RAPHAEL, Sunday Times

‘Paul Kennedy’s epic study … will long remain a standard source of reference.’

PHILIP TOWLE, London Review of Books

‘If it’s the red meat of history you want, there is plenty to get your teeth into …’

RUSSELL LEWIS, Daily Mail

‘This is a book of immense intellectual confidence. … I cannot recommend this book too highly.’

NICK BUTLER, Tribune

‘This book is falling out of briefcases all over Washington DC, both because it looks and sounds erudite and because it purports to answer an increasingly common question, viz: Has the United States already embarked on its journey into the sunset of empire? And since, despite its impressive footnotes and intimidating bibliography, the thesis of the book is very easy to assimilate, it is administering a lot of frissons to trendwatchers.’

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, Guardian