Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West pdf

Thomas Holland is an English author who has published best-selling books on topics including classical and medieval history and the origins of Islam. In addition to his writing, he has worked with the BBC to create and host historical television documentaries, and presents the radio series Making History. Holland was born in Oxfordshire 5 January 1968 and brought up in the village of Broad Chalke, Wiltshire, England. James Holland is also an author whose focus is World War II. He has said that his two passions as a child were dinosaurs and ancient civilizations. Holland attended Chafyn Grove preparatory school and the independent Canford School in Dorset. He then went on to Queens' College, Cambridge, graduating with a 'Double First' (first-class honours in both parts I and II of the course of study in the English Tripos). He began working on a doctoral dissertation on Lord Byron, at Oxford University, but soon quit after deciding that he was "fed up with universities and fed up with being poor" and instead began working.

Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West pdf by Tom Holland

In 480 B.C., Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For seventy years, victory—rapid, spectacular victory—had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire. In the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Near East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, putting together an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. Yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks of the mainland managed to hold out. The Persians were turned back. Greece remained free. Had the Greeks been defeated in the epochal naval battle at Salamis, not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely that there would ever have been such an entity as the West at all.Tom Holland’s brilliant new book describes the very first “clash of Empires” between East and West. As he did in the critically praised Rubicon, he has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our own. There is no other popular history that takes in the entire sweep of the Persian Wars, and no other classical historian, academic or popular, who combines scholarly rigor with novelistic depth with a worldly irony in quite the fashion that Tom Holland does.