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Historical person
1859–1941
Wilhelm II was German emperor and king of Prussia from 1888 until his abdication in 1918. His assertive personal style, naval expansion and pursuit of Weltpolitik contributed to international tension, although responsibility for German policy remained divided among military, diplomatic and political institutions.
Defeat in the First World War forced him into exile in the Netherlands, where he lived until 1941. Wilhelm II was born in Kronprinzenpalais and died in Huis Doorn.
Barbara Hambly’s Blood Maidens turns Wilhelm II into the sponsor of a fictional pre-war scheme to recruit vampires as German weapons, using the Kaiser’s militarised Europe as the novel’s political threat. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s His Last Bow, Holmes emerges from retirement in August 1914 after infiltrating a German spy network gathering intelligence for the Kaiser. Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants places Wilhelm within the dynastic and diplomatic world whose collapse carries German and British families into the First World War. Christopher Clark’s Kaiser Wilhelm II examines his upbringing, dismissal of Bismarck, public interventions and influence within the Wilhelmine political system, while M. J. Carter’s The Three Emperors compares him with his cousins George V and Nicholas II and shows how family intimacy failed to restrain imperial rivalry.
Series
The Century Trilogy follows five interconnected families from Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States from the years before the First World War to the collapse of Communist rule in Europe. Across three generations, miners, aristocrats, diplomats, political organisers, soldiers and journalists experience public events through marriages, rivalries…
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The Crown Family Saga follows a German-American family in Chicago as immigration, industrial wealth and new forms of entertainment transform the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Beginning with young Pauli Kroner’s arrival from Berlin, the novels explore the household of brewery magnate Joe Crown…
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Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon follows the consulting detective and Dr John Watson through four novels and five principal short-story collections. Beginning with their meeting in A Study in Scarlet, the sequence establishes Holmes’s method of close observation, forensic experiment and deductive reasoning as he investigates murder,…
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Former British spy and Oxford philologist James Asher is forced into an uneasy alliance with the ancient Spanish vampire Don Simon Ysidro. With James’s wife Lydia, a physician and scientific investigator, they pursue murders, disappearances and political schemes that connect the hidden societies of the undead with European…
All books in this series
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
