Cambridge authors top Sunday Times best reads

Professor Tim Blanning's account of one of the most extraordinary and dynamic periods in Europe's history, The Pursuit of Glory, Europe 1648-1815, and Dr. Terri Apter's study of the complex ties that bind sisters, The Sister Knot, were advertised as books you ‘really must read' by the Sunday Times.

Sibling relationships generally have far more impact on our psyches than was once imagined, but the relationship between sisters, says Apter, is unique in its intensity. It creates extremes of love, fear, rivalry and protectiveness that affect us for the rest of our lives.

Having interviewed 76 sisters from 37 family groups, ranging in age from five to 71, Apter uncovers the complexities of sistering, a drive which forms the basis for women's other social relationships – particularly with other women, but also with men. Her account culminates in a nuanced understanding of how sisterhood goes beyond the family, permeating women's social and individual identities.

In The Pursuit of Glory Tim Blanning brings to life the period in Europe's history from the desolate, battered and introvert continent of the end of the Thirty Years War to the overwhelmingly dynamic one that experienced the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon.

From the lives of ordinary farmers and soldiers to great kings, from art, leisure pursuits and garden design to the strange sport of fox-tossing, Blanning explores this era of immense change, and cultural, political and technological ferment.

This was a world in which the elite were obsessed with the pursuit of glory; it was a time of immense expenditure - as much on clothes, banquets and palaces as on fortresses and artillery - which shaped the societies and economies of entire countries.

Terri Apter, Senior Tutor at Newnham College, is a social psychologist with expertise on the development of adolescents and young adults within the family and society; changing balance of work and family in women's lives and mother/daughter relationships.

She is also the author of You Don't Really Know Me!, which analyses the arguments of mothers and teenage daughters, and of The Myth of Maturity in which she coined the term “thresholders” to describe the long transition from adolescence to adulthood.

She chose the pairing because they row more than anyone else - an average of once every two-and-a-half days, for 15 minutes at a time.

Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, has research interests focused on the history of continental Europe in the period 1660-1914.

He is also the general editor of The Oxford History of Modern Europe and of The Short Oxford History of Europe, editing personally the volumes on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the latter series.