Description
The book shows us familiar events and places from unusual vantage points: dilapidated mansions and boarding-houses, train carriages and cafes, where the game of espionage between east and west is often set. There are unexpected encounters with Shirley Temple, Fitzroy Maclean, Lech Walesa and the last Empress of Austria. Bassett finds himself at the funeral of King Nicola of Montenegro in Cetinje, plays bridge with the last man alive to have been decorated by the Austrian Emperor Franz-Josef and watches the KGB representative in Prague bestowing the last rites on the Soviet empire in Europe. Music and painting, architecture and landscape, food and wine, friendship and history run through the book. The author is lucky, observant and leans romantically towards the values of an older age. He brilliantly conjures the time, the people he meets, and Mitteleuropa in one of the pivotal decades of its history.
Author: Richard Bassett
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 05/01/2020
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.00w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780141979991
ISBN10: 0141979992
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs
- History | Modern | 20th Century | General
- History | Europe | General
About the Author
After reading Law and the History of Art at Cambridge, Richard Bassett set out for Central Europe and in 1983 became principal horn of the National Slovene Opera House in Ljubljana. In 1985 he was appointed Central European and then Eastern European correspondent for The Times. His previous books include A Guide to Central Europe (1987), Hitler's Spy Chief: The Wilhelm Canaris Mystery (2005) and For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army, 1619-1918 (2015). He is a Bye-Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, and Visiting Professor at the Central Europe University of Budapest. He is currently working on a biography of the Empress Maria Theresa.