Last Days in Old Europe by Richard Bassett

With these vivid wistful memoirs he joins the great chroniclers of Europe the Prousts Zweigs Lampedusas LeighFermors 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 a Paperback softback