From the bestselling author of The Templars, Dan Jones's epic new history tells nothing less than the story of how the world we know today came to be built.

Across 16 chapters, blending Dan Jones' trademark gripping narrative style with authoritative analysis, Powers and Thrones shows how, at each stage in this story, successive western powers thrived by attracting – or stealing – the most valuable resources, ideas and people from the rest of the world. It casts new light on iconic locations – Rome, Paris, Venice, Constantinople – and it features some of history's most famous and notorious men and women.

This is a book written about – and for – an age of profound change, and it asks the biggest questions about the West both then and now. Where did we come from? What made us? Where do we go from here?

"A terrifically colourful and compelling narrative history... A hugely impressive achievement, bustling and sizzling with life... This is now simply the best popular history of the Middle Ages' Sunday Times

A great achievement, pulling together many strands with aplomb' Peter Frankopan, Spectator, Books of the Year

'It's so delightful to encounter a skilled historian of such enormous energy who's never afraid of being entertaining' The Times, Books of the Year

'An amazing masterly gripping panorama' Simon Sebag Montefiore

'A badass history writer... to put it mildly' Duff McKagan