There are two names that are musts for the military history of Prussia under Frederick the Great: Christopher Duffy and Dennis Showalter. Duffy's The Army of Frederick the Great is, to borrow a phrase used to describe Elting's Swords around a Throne, a muzzle to buttplate account of the Prussian army. Duffy's biography of Frederick emphasizes his military career and is a good companion piece to his work on the army. Showalter's biography Frederick the Great: A Military History has a critical focus and emphasizes that Frederick was not an innate military genius. It's also worth the time to check out Showalter's The Wars of Frederick the Great, an excellent analysis of the political context of Frederick the Great's military campaigns. Moving away from the battlefields, Karl W. Schweizer's various monographs on the Anglo-Prussian alliance shows how divergent geopolitical priorities hastened the dissolution of the alliance. Rebellious Prussians: Urban Culture under Frederick the Great and his Successors by Florian Schui covers more than the Seven Years War, but provides a useful corrective to notions of a Prussian absolutism in which the masses played little role.