The Habsburg twilight

Sarah Gainham

Sarah Gainham, for decades a celebrated European correspondent for the London Spectator during the post WWII years, and the author of Night Falls on the City and other novels of Vienna, writes authoritatively about the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with the perceptiveness and knowledge of that lost civilisation. She recalls eight major characters of Viennese history, from the tragic Crown Prince Rudolf who committed suicide with his young mistress, to the great composer and head of the Vienna Opera Gustav Mahler, the woman who founded the fabled Hotel Sacher, the celebrated journalist Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, or Karl Lueger, the populist Mayor of Vienna whose stridency and amazing successes with the masses recall today's Donald Trump. As the Kirkus Review writes, "Gainham believes that the notion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's long and...

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