Complete and unabridged, with 54 full-page plates by Jacob Philipp Hackert, Christian Georg Schütz and Edvard Munch. Berlin, 1740: the old king dies, and the son he beat, imprisoned and forced to watch his friend beheaded takes the throne — and within months has invaded Silesia. Mühlbach was Klara Mundt, who wrote nearly three hundred volumes and poured the courts of Europe into them; she is a gossip with archives, and her Frederick — flute, French verses, cold contempt — is the one the nineteenth century believed. Fifty-four plates ranging from Hackert's eighteenth-century prospects to Munch's northern interiors give the court and its century a visual life.