Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in her time
Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, translated by Robert Savage
Princeton University Press, £35, 1104 pages
Mine was probably the last generation of Protestant schoolchildren to be taught that the Seven Years’ War was the beginning of modern British national glory. Classrooms at my school in the early Sixties still had prints hung on the walls showing Clive’s victories in India, and General Wolfe ensuring British dominion in Canada by storming the Plains of Abraham.
