Royal Highness — Thomas Mann

"The great virtue of Royal Highness is its relaxed, fairy-tale quality that naturally brings the reader inside that 'Edwardian' calm which preceded everything common to contemporary social life. It is very easy to make connections between the book and theories of stratification, statemaking, ritual, legitimacy, even the political economy of preindustrialized states." -- Alan Sica, author of Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order