Richard Butterwick

A major new assessment of the “vanished kingdom” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—one which recognises its achievements before its destruction. Richard Butterwick tells the compelling story of the last decades of one of Europe’s largest and least understood polities: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Drawing on the latest research, Butterwick vividly portrays the turbulence the Commonwealth experienced. Far from seeing it as a...

Lithuania is often portrayed as a small nation-state that has survived against the odds of history: together with Estonia and Latvia, it won independence at the end of the First World War, lost it to the Soviet Union in 1939-40, regained it in 1990-1991, and joined NATO and the EU in 2004, angering the Kremlin. But Lithuania's rich and complex...