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Last Days in Old Europe

Author: Richard Bassett

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2019-01-31

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0241014875

The final decade of the Cold War, through the eyes of a laconic and elegant observer 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.

Last Days in Old Europe

Author: Richard Bassett

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2020-04-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0141979992

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'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.

Last Days in Old Europe

Author: Richard Bassett

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780241014868

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Part memoir, part reflection, this book brings to life central Europe during the last ten years of the Cold War. It begins in Trieste in 1979 where the resonances of the Habsburg Empire are still strong. The second part moves to the darker, claustrophobic world of Vienna in 1985, where the atmosphere of the Cold War seemed to infiltrate every brick of a city hovering between two worlds, and even the most seemingly harmless of culinary establishments masked the game of espionage between East and West. In the third part, the story shifts to Prague in 1989 during the dramatic, intoxicating days of the 'velvet revolution' and the long-awaited opening up of the east. Revolution, when it came was from above rather than below: Moscow was far more engaged with events during those turbulent November weeks than is generally appreciated. Throughout the book we encounter a diverse array of glittering characters: penniless aristocrats, charming gangsters, even Amazonian blondes in the service of Eastern European spy agencies; fractious diplomatists and disinherited royalty supply a colourful supporting cast. With charm, wit and insight, Richard Bassett recreates through his personal encounters the elegy, farce and tragedy of Central Europe in the last days of communism.

The Last Days of Europe

Author: Walter Laqueur

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2007-05-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0312368704

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The Last Man in Europe

Author: Dennis Glover

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2017-11-14

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1468315927

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This “riveting novel about Orwell’s last days” takes readers inside the renowned author’s mind as he creates his final dystopian masterpiece (New Statesman). April, 1947. In a run-down farmhouse on a remote Scottish island, George Orwell begins his last and greatest work, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Forty-three years old and suffering from the tuberculosis that within three winters will take his life, Orwell comes to see the book as his legacy—the culmination of a career spent fighting to preserve the freedoms which the wars and upheavals of the twentieth century have threatened. Completing the book is an urgent challenge, a race against death. In this masterful novel, Dennis Glover explores the creation of Orwell’s classic work which defined the twentieth century for millions of readers worldwide—and has continued to prove its unnerving relevance in the twenty-first. Simultaneously a captivating drama, a unique literary excavation, and an unflinching portrait of a writer, The Last Man in Europe will change the way we understand both our enduringly Orwellian times and Orwell’s timeless masterpiece.

Postwar

Author: Tony Judt

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-09-05

Total Pages: 1000

ISBN-13: 9780143037750

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Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Last Palace

Author: Norman Eisen

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0451495799

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A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa’s greatest houses—and the lives of its occupants When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador’s residence in Prague, returning to the land his mother had fled after the Holocaust, he was startled to discover swastikas hidden beneath the furniture in his new home. These symbols of Nazi Germany were remnants of the residence’s forgotten history, and evidence that we never live far from the past. From that discovery unspooled the twisting, captivating tale of four of the remarkable people who had called this palace home. Their story is Europe’s, and The Last Palace chronicles the upheavals that transformed the continent over the past century. There was the optimistic Jewish financial baron, Otto Petschek, who built the palace after World War I as a statement of his faith in democracy, only to have that faith shattered; Rudolf Toussaint, the cultured, compromised German general who occupied the palace during World War II, ultimately putting his life at risk to save the house and Prague itself from destruction; Laurence Steinhardt, the first postwar US ambassador whose quixotic struggle to keep the palace out of Communist hands was paired with his pitched efforts to rescue the country from Soviet domination; and Shirley Temple Black, an eyewitness to the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, who determined to return to Prague and help end totalitarianism—and did just that as US ambassador in 1989. Weaving in the life of Eisen’s own mother to demonstrate how those without power and privilege moved through history, The Last Palace tells the dramatic and surprisingly cyclical tale of the triumph of liberal democracy.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

Author: Jan Morris

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2001-10-12

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1439136939

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One hundred years ago, Trieste was the chief seaport of the entire Austro-Hungarian empire, but today many people have no idea where it is. This fascinating Italian city on the Adriatic, bordering the former Yugoslavia, has always tantalized Jan Morris with its moodiness and melancholy. She has chosen it as the subject of this, her final work, because it was the first city she knew as an adult -- initially as a young soldier at the end of World War II, and later as an elderly woman. This is not only her last book, but in many ways her most complex as well, for Trieste has come to represent her own life with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves and memories. Jan Morris evokes Trieste's modern history -- from the long period of wealth and stability under the Habsburgs, through the ambiguities of Fas-cism and the hardships of the Cold War. She has been going to Trieste for more than half a century and has come to see herself reflected in it: not just her interests and preoccupations -- cities, empires, ships and animals -- but her intimate convictions about such matters as patriotism, sex, civility and kindness. Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is the culmination of a singular career.

Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe

Author: Daniel Levy

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1789602572

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Shortly after the hostilities of the Iraq War were declared to have come to an end, the renowned philosopher Jurgen Habermas, with the endorsement of Jacques Derrida, published a manifesto invoking the notion of a "core Europe," distinct from both the British and the "new" European candidates for EU membership, and defined above all by its secular, Enlightenment and social-democratic traditions. A key component of the manifesto was its insistence on the need for a counterweight to the perceived influence of the US, a theme that also resonates in recent discussions about the establishment of a European military force outside the command structures of NATO. On the same weekend in May 2003, a number of other leading intellectuals, among them Umberto Eco, Gianni Vattimo and Richard Rorty, published essays addressing these themes in major European newspapers, and almost immediately responses to these essays began to appear. The writings sparked a lively debate about the nature of "Europe" and transatlantic relations that reverberates through contemporary discussion. This volume provides readers in the Anglophone world the opportunity to gain access to the debate. As the fallout from the Iraq war continues to rumble and EU expansion continues apace, this is compelling reading for anyone interested in the future of Europe and the transatlantic alliance.

The Last Battle

Author: Stephen Harding

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2013-05-07

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0306822091

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The incredible story of the unlikeliest battle of World War II, when a small group of American soldiers joined forces with German soldiers to fight off fanatical SS troops May, 1945. Hitler is dead, the Third Reich is little more than smoking rubble, and no GI wants to be the last man killed in action against the Nazis. The Last Battle tells the nearly unbelievable story of the unlikeliest battle of the war, when a small group of American tankers, led by Captain Lee, joined forces with German soldiers to fight off fanatical SS troops seeking to capture Castle Itter and execute the stronghold's VIP prisoners. It is a tale of unlikely allies, startling bravery, jittery suspense, and desperate combat between implacable enemies.