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"A magisterial portrait .... Gay makes comprehensible, as no other recent history I have read does, how a seemingly remote assassination in Sarajevo could tip over an entire civilization.... [He] makes the past make emotional sense."

Richard Sennett, Los Angeles Times Book Review "With sweep, erudition, and insight, Gay ... explores aggression as both a constructive and a destructive force in Victorian life.... [He] proves here to be fascinating, original, and humane a genial guide even when so concerned with conflict."

Kirkus Reviews "Gay knows how to analyze the multiple psychological layers of a perennially popular emotion like aggression.... He is so widely read in the sources, so acrobatic in leaping across political and intellectual frontiers, so imaginative in marshalling anecdotes and examples, that the book is a bargain for its empirical evidence alone.... Peter Gay's brilliant capstone to his bourgeois trilogy does ingenious justice to the secret wellsprings of behavior in the last century and to the triumphs, failures, and confusions of late Western civilization."

Harold Perkin, Northwestern University, in the [London] Times Literary Supplement

PETER GAY is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. His other books include The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, which won a National Book Award, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom, two previous volumes in the series The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, and the bestselling Freud: A Lifefor Our Time.

Cover illustration: "Mensur auf Schlager" (Fighting a Duel). Student scene, G6ttingen, 1847. Contemporary lithograph. Original: Stad. Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz Kunstbibliothek. Cover design by Dick Adelson