A Kingdom and a Village

A$60 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

A deeply learned yet highly readable and entertaining history of Moscow, a city defined by its survival and reinvention, and whose rich history offers crucial insight into contemporary global politics. An erudite and entertaining history of Moscow, a city whose rich past offers crucial insight into contemporary global politics Moscow stands at the centre of a nation comprising eleven percent of the globe's landmass, eleven time zones, and nearly one hundred and fifty million people, some thirteen million of whom live in the capital. In A Kingdom and a Village, acclaimed historian Simon Morrison offers a vividly rendered history of Russia's heart and soul, tracing its transformation from a 'big village' - the demeaning nickname the St. Petersburg nobility gave to its provincial neighbour - into a spectacular metropolis of vast geopolitical import. That arc is the stuff of dramatic, violent, stranger-than-fiction historical narrative: the last century alone has featured invasions and costly battles, the destruction (and reconstruction) of sacred cultural and religious landmarks, and the collapse of the Soviet republic - not to mention the rise of an authoritarian leader who is a keen student of Russian history. Morrison reaches back to the city's founding as a fortress on a river nearly a millennium ago. In the centuries that followed, any number of external forces - from Tatar Mongols and Swedes to Napoleon and Hitler - set their sights on Moscow, bolstering its self-conceptio

• Binding: Hardcover

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