This textbook offers a succinct and self-contained introduction into general relativity and its main areas of application: compact objects, gravitational waves and cosmology. It has evolved from lecture courses I have taught at the University of Utrecht since 1990. The book is intended for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in physics and astrophysics. The past decades have seen spectacular new developments in our knowledge of cosmology, the physics of compact objects and in high precision gravity experiments. As a result, relativistic astrophysics and cosmology have become a very attractive element in the (astro)physics curriculum, and there is a variety of excellent textbooks. But most of these are either.
