The Culture of the Europeans

A magisterial narrative account of the creation and consumption of all forms of ‘culture’ across the European continent over the last two hundred years.This compelling, wide-ranging and hugely ambitious book offers, for the first time ever, an integrated history of the culture produced and consumed by Europeans since 1800, and follows its transformation from an elite activity to a mass market – from lending libraries to the internet, from the first public concerts to music downloads.In itself a cultural tour de force, the book covers high and low culture, readers and writers, audiences and prima donnas, Rossini and hip hop, Verdi and the Beatles, Zola and Tintin, Walter S…