Mr. Mansel, building on his formidable reputation as the most stylish of historians of modern Europe, is as good at explaining and illustrating Louis’s decline as his ascendancy.

Almost everything about Louis XIV — the size of his palaces, the length of his reign, the height of his heels — was on a gargantuan scale.

The self-control of Louis — and his pathological secretiveness — has made him difficult quarry for historians. Thus far, no other English-language biography has so successfully given us a portrait of him as man and monarch. Mansel is strong at recreating the king’s inner life.

I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas Books’, and there was a comment of Jonathan Sumption’s that ‘as a general rule, biography is a poor way to learn history’. It is primarily a matter of approach rather than simply subject of course, but if one was drawing up a shortlist of men who might qualify as exceptions to the rule, then Philip Mansel’s King of the World, Louis XIV, would surely be very near the top.

Philip Mansel writes shrewdly about the self-styled Sun King’s doomed endeavours to enlarge his dominion.

Philip Mansel’s King of the World chronicles Louis’s seventy-two-year reign.

The King of the World [...] tends to take place on a far wider international scale than any previous English-language biography of Louis XIV. The King’s colorful and convoluted Court life usually tends to preoccupy his biographers, and Mansel seeks to counterbalance that with more detailed accounts of French colonial exploits far from Versailles. Mansel has mastered a bewildering array of primary and secondary sources dealing with his man and his time period, and he’s invested his entire narrative with a kind of tightly compressed narrative energy that has the most unlikely effect imaginable: it turns a 600-page biography of King Louis XIV into a genuine page-turner of a reading experience.

A wonderfully meticulous look at Louis XIV (1638-1715) from a leading historian of France.