I am a historian of diplomacy, war, and empire. A founding editor ofThe International History Review, I have written books on ‘Imperial Diplomacy’, on the origins of the First World War, and on the July Crisis.I have edited: the 5-volume Encyclopedia of War andthe 4-volumeEncyclopedia of Diplomacy; the journals of A.L. Kennedy for the Royal Historical Society; numerous collections of essays, and the multi-volume Seminar Studies in History series. I am currently working on a two-volume study of Political Intelligence in Great Britain, 1900-1950, which is a group biography of the men who made up the Department of Political Intelligence in Britain, 1917-1919
John Keiger followed his study of French foreign policy with a ground-breaking biography of the most important Frenchman of the day, Raymond Poincaré. Readers have a multitude of biographies to turn to in their quest for an explanation of the war’s origins: the rulers of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary; the leading politicians, foreign ministers, strategists, and diplomats of most of the states involved. But no biographical study has surpassed Keiger’s.
Poincaré was a pivotal figure in the diplomacy and politics of Europe before the war, serving in numerous positions, including those of foreign minister, prime minister, and president. His devotion to the alliance with Russia and his distrust of Germany led his critics to denounce him for his role in the outbreak of war. Keiger’s magnificent biography provides us with an elegantly written, thoroughly researched, and nuanced account of Poincaré’s role and policies.
This study is a scholarly biography of one of France's foremost political leaders. In a career which ran from the 1880s to the 1930s, one of the most formative periods of modern French history, Poincare held the principal offices of state. He played crucial roles in France's entry into the Great War, the organisation of the war effort, the peace settlement, the reparations question, the occupation of the Ruhr and the reorganisation of French finances in the 1920s. His life and work is surrounded by controversy and myth, from 'Poincare-la-guerre' to 'Poincare-le-franc', which this book dissects. Using a host of…
When I produced a recording of lost works by Alexander Zemlinsky with Riccardo Chailly for Decca Records in 1984, I soon realized that a wealth of music had been lost during the Nazi years that had never been recovered. After initiating and supervising the recording series Entartete Musik for Decca, the first retrospective of major works lost during the Nazi years, I headed research in this subject at London University’s Jewish Music Institute. I was a music curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum. YUP published one of my books, and I am a co-founder of the Research Center and Archive “Exilarte” based at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts.
This is a novel that is tender and sad, and it relates in a language that is simple and poetic to the atmosphere of the Habsburg Empire during its final days. The novel takes place in the provinces rather than in the capital. Every line of the book can be savored, with every sentence laden with nostalgia for a world that seems like another, kinder planet. It is the world that pre-dated one of my other recommendations, The Strudlhof Steps, in its presentation of people with a sense of purpose, duty, and loyalty, even if not blessed with an abundance of acumen.
These were well-intentioned people trying to hold an empire together of disparate people and cultures. The empire represented an ideal world of Habsburg paternalism to Jews, Slavs, and Hungarians. It is difficult to conclude the book without tears. No cinematic version has done it justice—nothing captures the…
'One of the greatest novels ever written' Philippe Sands
Roth's masterpiece: an epic, moving account of the final days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, told through the fortunes of one family.
Set against the doomed splendour of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Radetzky March tells the story of the celebrated Trotta family, tracing their rise and fall over three generations. Theirs is a sweeping history of heroism and duty, desire and compromise, tragedy and heartbreak, a story that lasts until the darkening eve of World War One, when all is set to fall apart. Rich, epic and profoundly moving, The Radetzky March…
When I produced a recording of lost works by Alexander Zemlinsky with Riccardo Chailly for Decca Records in 1984, I soon realized that a wealth of music had been lost during the Nazi years that had never been recovered. After initiating and supervising the recording series Entartete Musik for Decca, the first retrospective of major works lost during the Nazi years, I headed research in this subject at London University’s Jewish Music Institute. I was a music curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum. YUP published one of my books, and I am a co-founder of the Research Center and Archive “Exilarte” based at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts.
This is somehow the antidote to Roth’s novel. It is a daunting read, often thought of as a Viennese answer to Proust. What was fascinating was its very unsentimental and often quite funny representation of wealthy Viennese society. Musil is a seductive writer and it is easy to keep reading even while wondering when something might actually happen.
Like Roth, the effect of the novel is cumulative–only after reading it suddenly comes together. It also balances the presentation of Vienna as a city of musicians and poets and gives us the politicians, the mathematicians, the scientists, and the economists. The central character is himself a mathematician with little comprehension of the finer arts.
It is 1913, and Viennese high society is determined to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef. But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ordinary Viennese world is beginning to show signs of more serious rebellion. Caught in the middle of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: youngish, rich, an ex-soldier, seducer and scientist.
Unable to deceive himself that the jumble of attributes and values that his world has bestowed on him amounts to anything…
Stories of the small adventures and ruminations of a
wealthy old man in Trieste may not sound that gripping. But our protagonist,
Zeno Cosini, is a really compelling and funny portrait of pedantic self-absorption.
The
book has qualities akin to Diary of a Nobody, though Zeno’s world is far
more elevated than Charles Pooter. This was the author’s last book and is
unfinished but with this new translation, by Frederika Randall, it’s a charming
classic.
A newly translated collection of fiction by the influential Italian modernist, continuing on his landmark work Zeno's Conscience.
A Very Old Man collects five linked stories, parts of an unfinished novel that the great Triestine Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his life, after the international success of Zeno’s Conscience in 1923.
Here Svevo revisits with new vigor and agility themes that fascinated him from the start—aging, deceit, and self-deception, as well as the fragility, fecklessness, and plain foolishness of the bourgeois paterfamilias—even as memories of the recent, terrible slaughter of World War I and the contemporary rise of…
A touching and sympathetic
biography of one of Europe’s greatest twentieth-century writers, best known as
the author of The Radetzky March, and
an essential introduction to his other novels (too little read in English).
We
follow Roth as he flits between Europe’s cultural centres, his melancholy mood
tracking the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire. With Pim as our guide, it
is impossible not to sense the fragile state of more contemporary political
unions, as Roth’s plight in a way becomes our own.
The first English language biography of the great European writer Joseph Roth, exploring his genius and his tragic life story, lived in the shadow of war.
The brilliant, mercurial, self-mythologising novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the European 20th century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was an observer and chronicler of his times. Born and raised in Galicia on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his life's decline mirrored the collapse of civilised Europe: in his last peripatetic years, he was exiled from Germany, his wife driven into an asylum, and he died an alcoholic on the eve of…
I am the son of Irish rural immigrants who at the age of nearly eighty already occupies several vanished worlds myself: London in the 1950s and 60s, the old world of the European peasantry, and a time when the greatest war in human history was still a daily presence. I spent most of my life as an academic historian writing books for an academic audience. Then, to my surprise, at the tender age of seventy, I discovered that I could write prose that had a certain grace and dignity and which seemed to move people as well as inform them. So, I began a second career as what is called a “writer.”
Josef Roth is now recognized as one of the greatest German writers of the twentieth century. As a historian myself, I was entranced by reading it by the way in which the book catches the vast temporal arc of the transformation and then fall of a society that had for centuries been a major force in European history, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now forgotten, this was the world of Vienna’s great resplendence, then fall.
The story is told through the generational story of one family, the von Trottas. Impending loss is conveyed alongside great affection as a whole world is lost in the disasters of the First World War. The book was first published in English in 1933. In the words of another of Josef Roth’s books, “I was there,” which he was.
THE RADETSKY MARCH is subtle and touching study of family life at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writing in the traditional form of the family saga, Roth nevertheless manages to bring to his story a completely individual manner which gives at the same time the detailed and intimate portrait of a life and the wider panorama of a failing dynasty. Not yet well known in English-speaking countries, Joseph Roth is one of the most distinguished Austrian writers of our century, worthy to be bracketed with Musil and Kraus.
This was, hands down, one of the best historical
romances I've read this year. Great characters, engaging mystery, excellent sex
scenes (one of the best depictions of gaining consent that I've ever read), a
heroine who just won't quit, and a hero who is the quiet strength she needs at
her back.
In addition, there are well-drawn secondary characters
and a setting in Vienna at the beginning of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that's
as sparkling and rich as a sachertorte set to a background of waltz
music. I've enjoyed all the Diana Biller books I've read, but now she's an auto-buy author for me.
It's Ball Season in Vienna, and Maria Wallner only wants one thing: to restore her family's hotel, the Hotel Wallner, to its former glory. She's not going to let anything get in her way - not her parents' three-decade-long affair; not seemingly-random attacks by masked assassins; and especially not the broad-shouldered American foreign agent who's saved her life two times already. No matter how luscious his mouth is.
Eli Whittaker also only wants one thing: to find out who is selling American secret codes across Europe, arrest them, and go home to his sensible life in Washington, DC. He has…
Hermann Simon grew up on a small, remote farm and became a world-renowned marketing professor, including stints at MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. But academic fame didn’t satisfy him. He had the ambition to achieve an impact on practice and founded Simon-Kucher & Partners, today with 41 offices and 1600 employees the world's leading price consultancy. He also detected the secrets of the "hidden champions", unknown mid-sized global market leaders (more than 1.5 million Google entries). In China a business school is named in his honor.
Peter F. Drucker is the most famous and influential management thinker of the 20th century. He grew up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which fell at the end of the First World War. His classic education, his knowledge of history, his broad horizons, his understanding of business processes make him unique among management thinkers. He outshines them all. And he is an outstanding, captivating writer. Anyone who wants to learn and understand about management must read this book. I have read it three times. I mourn this late friend.
"It is [a] belief in diversity and pluralism and the uniqueness of each person that underlies all my writings ..." -from the Preface. Regarded as the most influential and widely read thinker on modern organizations and their management, Peter Drucker has also established himself as an unorthodox and independent analyst of politics, the economy, and society. A man of impressive scope and expertise, he has paved significant inroads in a number of key areas, sharing his knowledge and keen insight on everything from the plight of the employee and the effects of technology to the vicissitudes of the markets and…
Adam Hochschild is the author of ten books. The era of the First World War figures in his latest, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, and is the major subject of his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. To End All Wars has been translated into seven languages, won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is at work now on a book about the First World War era and its aftermath in the United States.
This book brings to life a part of the war Western readers know far too little about: the vast battles that ranged back and forth across Eastern Europe and Russia. Two of the three armies involved, those of Tsarist Russia and Austria-Hungary, were spectacularly incompetent, and saw their soldiers needlessly slaughtered by the millions before these two empires dissolved under the war’s impact.
On the outbreak of war in 1914, the armies of the western front soon became bogged down in the mud at Flanders. But on the wide plains and forests of Eastern Europe the three great Empires - Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary - grappled in a series of battles involving millions of men and hundreds of miles of front. Shortly after the outbreak of war the Russian "steamroller" had lurched into Prussia only to be hurled back amind the marshes of Tannenberg. For the next three years the fighting swung indeterminately back and forth. This work describes the campaigns which provoked…
I love to laugh! Laughter is a universal sort of magic that helps us connect with others, build rapport and trust, reduce stress, and overlook differences. It’s hard to be mad at someone you’re laughing with. How do I know so much about humor? Because I wrote the book on it. Literally. My debut book, The Joke Machine, teaches middle graders how to create a funny line. I wrote it after researching humor for years, analyzing jokes, and trying to figure out why each one made me laugh. I found patterns and my joke-making philosophy was born! Since then, I’ve been reading funny books, writing funny books, and best of all, laughing at funny lines.
I was hooked after the first sentence. The story starts with Colin, the main character, having just been dumped for the 19th time by a girl named Katherine, because he only dates girls with that name. To me, the premise is so funny, and so are Colin’s explanations of each relationship. As Colin embarks on a road trip with his best friend, he hilariously recounts his time with each Katherine, referring to them by their numbers such as Katherine V, Katherine X, and the most current, Katherine XIX, who he hopes will be different. But come on Colin, haven’t the first 18 Katherines taught you anything? I love that Colin is such an oddly adorable insecure teen. I loved following him through this story as he learns a little more about life and a lot more about love.
"Will slip equally well into a pocket as a Christmas stocking." - The Wall Street Journal, "What to Give," holiday gift guide.
Introducing Penguin Minis! #1 bestselling author John Green like you've never read him before. * Featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC's "The World," Real Simple, BuzzFeed, Bustle, and more!
The award winning An Abundance of Katherines is now available as a Penguin Mini edition. Complete and unabridged, the book's revolutionary landscape design and ultra-thin paper makes it easy to hold in one hand without sacrificing readability. Perfectly-sized to slip into a pocket or bag,…
