‘Wheatcroft has a real feel for the heterogeneous geography of the Habsburg domains

I especially admired his feel for the Spanish Habsburg.

Time and again, he neatly links the monarchs with the specific monuments they constructed for themselves’

Niall Ferguson in the Sunday Telegraph

‘The Habsburgs has been in the making for almost thirty years, and the long gestation has yielded a rich outcome … Wheatcroft’s principal aim is the present the way the Habsburgs saw themselves, in the centuries of their dominance, in the centuries of their dominance, and to examine the image which, more or less consciously, they offered to the world … required reading for anyone who hopes to understand the real Europe’

Allan Massie in the Daily Telegraph

‘ An absorbing, readable history.

In their excess of introversion and endogamy the Habsburgs have made themselves a match for the most flamboyant family.

What other royal house, after all, could produce such unforgettable figures as mad Queen Juana, progressing through Spain with her husband’s decaying body … 'heroically fetile’ Maria Theresa … or the quixotic Maximilian, ‘Emperor’ or Mexico?‘

Michael Kerrigan in the Scotsman

'Wheatcroft’s perspective is strongly visual, emphasizing the art works and ceremonials through which the Habsburgs defined themselves and maintained their position … The reader acquires a sense of the remarkable stubbornness, patience and devotion to duty of the leading members of the family’

Andrew Whiteside in the Wall Street Journal