'With these vivid wistful memoirs he joins the great chroniclers of Europe - the Prousts
Zweigs Lampedusas Leigh-Fermors and Bassanis - and shows how some of the things those writers
loved persisted as late as 1989.' (Economist) Selected as a Book of the Year in the TLS and
Spectator In 1979 Richard Bassett set out on a series of adventures and encounters in central
Europe which allowed him to savour the last embers of the cosmopolitan old Hapsburg lands and
gave him a ringside seat at the fall of another ancien regime that of communist rule. From
Trieste to Prague and Vienna to Warsaw fading aristocrats charming gangsters fractious
diplomats and glamorous informants provided him with an unexpected counterpoint to the
austerities of life along the Iron Curtain first as a professional musician and then as a
foreign correspondent.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.
