Charles Hill's new work offers an illuminating and incisive look into two realms traditionally seen as distinct: literature and international relations. The book provides a lively historical account of international relations as depicted in great works of literature, and how these literary works affect our perceptions about the nature of statecraft, but it surpasses and defies neat categorization. For Hill the relationship between these two aspects of the human condition is both subtle and mutually reinforcing. He asks us to consider international relations and statecraft as something partially formed by, and likewise informed by, literary works—and, more broadly, the literary imaginary.

Hill's subject matter is a difficult one because, naturally, it is not easy to organize a list of definitive works on the topic. Surely he could have turned Grand Strategies into a multivolume work, or just as easily have written an entire book on the insights to be gleaned from a serious study of Thucydides' Peloponnesian War or T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom— both of which are discussed here, along with more than seventy other works, stretching from Homer to Salman Rushdie. What makes Grand Strategies so edifying, though—for those more versed in either politics or literature—is the global perspective engendered by the author's approach. Tracing the genealogy of literary tropes and themes through the ages, Hill shows how these themes exert a subtle but pervasive influence in ordering the minds of scholars, politicians, and diplomats alike. To cite just one example, he convincingly demonstrates the influence of Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Iliad on Walt Whitman's majestic Leaves of Grass, and the latter work's deep resonance with Abraham Lincoln, whose prose, and person, was shaken by contact with the Good Grey Poet. Multidisciplinary in scope and outlook, the work will be equally fascinating to political scientists, politicians and diplomats, and literary critics.