The Enlightenment had dislodged Christianity from its central position in the life of European societies.

Man’s quest for ecstasy and transcendence flooded into areas such as the arts, spawning the Romantic movement.

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century this secular quest for salvation gave rise to a widespread desire for ideal communities.

In ‘Holy Madness’, Adam Zamoyski traces how worship and dedication originally channelled through the church was refocused on the cause of the people and the nation.

This dramatic journey begins in America in 1776 and goes right up to the last agony of the Paris Commune in 1871, taking in the French revolution, the Irish rebellion, the Polish uprisings, the war of Greek liberation, the Russian insurrection, the Hungarian struggles for freedom, the liberation of South America and the Italian Risorgimento.

On a vast canvas, Adam Zamoyski combines an exhilarating voyage through these spectacular events with illuminating portraits of the key players – Lafayette, Garibaldi, Lamartine, Kossuth, Mazzini, Napoleon, Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Coleridge, Byron, Bakunin, Rousseau and Bolivar.

‘Zamoyski is a fluent and entertaining writer, and has been greatly praised for the style, sweep and authority of his previous books...an ambitious and in many ways brilliant book.’ – Hilary Mantel, Daily Telegraph

‘Splendidly descriptive, full of music and colour. It is not unlike a symphonic poem, with operative bits here and there...both charming and learned...Zamoyski sweeps across three generations of revolutionaries...a tapestry-like essay woven with 100 strands of romantic history.’ –The Times

‘Bold narrative history at its most imaginative.’ –Observer

Count Adam Stefan Zamoyski is a historian and a member of the ancient Zamoyski family of Polish nobility. His books include ‘The Last King of Poland’, ‘The Forgotten Few’, and ‘Paderewski’.

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