They Were Found Wanting

Pleasure of a different scale and kind. It is a sort of Galsworthian panorama of life in the dying years of the Habsburg empire - perfect late night reading for nostalgic romantics like me.

Just about as good as any fiction I have ever read, like Anna Karenina and War and Peace rolled into one. Love, sex, town, country, money, power, beauty, and the pathos of a society which cannot prevent its own destruction - all are here.

An impressively fluent text. In telling its larger story, it gives a wealth of detail about an extraordinary society, and makes you feel that the colours, scents and sounds of distant lives are still spread out before you.

Fascinating. He writes about the quirky border lairds and squires and the high misty forest ridges and valleys of Transylvania with something of the ache that Milosz brings to the contemplation of his lost Eden

Plunge into the cleansing waters of a rediscovered masterpiece.

Like Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, Miklos Banffy is one of those novelists Austria-Hungary specialised in. Intimate and sparkling chroniclers of a wider ruin, ironic and elegiac.

Full of arresting descriptions, beautiful evocations of scenery and wise political and moral insights.