Danubia

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What to expect

Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction

'Funny, erudite, frequently irritating . . . and never boring' – Sarah Bakewell, Financial Times

'An excellent, rich and amusing read' – The Times, Book of the Week

For centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off – through luck, guile and sheer mulishness – any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the Danube they ruled most of Central Europe and Germany and interfered everywhere – indeed the history of Europe hardly makes sense without them.

Danubia plunges the reader into a maelstrom of alchemy, skeletons, jewels, bear-moats, unfortunate marriages and a guinea-pig village. Full of music, piracy, religion and fighting, it is the history of a dynasty, but it is at least as much about the people they ruled, who spoke many different languages, lived in a vast range of landscapes, believed in many rival gods and often showed a marked ingratitude towards their oddball ruler in Vienna.

Joining Germania and Lotharingia in Simon Winder's endlessly fascinating retelling of European history, Danubia is a hilarious, eccentric and witty saga.

Critics Review

'It combines history, travelogue and digressive personal essay. Winder is a puppyishly enthusiastic companion: funny, erudite, frequently irritating, always more in control of his material than he pretends to be, and never for a moment boring . . . Danubia is a moving book, and also a sensuous one . . . Miniaturist in its eye for detail, grand in its scope, it skips beats and keeps our attention all the way'
Financial Times
'A fresh look at a region and a dynasty of which most of us in the English-speaking world are quite ignorant' Guardian
‘Memorably funny . . . wonderfully readable and entertaining’ Sunday Times
Danubia is 500 years of Habsburg imperial history told in the style of a bumbling English detective, the kind of sleuth who appears to skirt around a knotty case and then disarmingly poses a penetrating question . . . It all makes for an excellent, rich and amusing read’
The Times, Book of the Week
The high plateau of my year was my catching up with Simon Winder. Danubia and Germania are an idiosyncratic, often funny fusion of history writing, travel writing and disrespect
TLS
Anyone with an interest in a part of Europe and a section of history largely ignored in our schools and universities will find this book richly rewarding
Literary Review
‘Winder is an engaging host . . . The Habsburgs were, latterly, authoritarian liberals. They survived by guile and luck, by sheer chance and cold expediency. With the exceptions of figures like Rudolf II, that melancholy devotee of the occult, there are few of them one can imagine a novelist wanting to explore. Yet Winder rightly enthuses over the contribution this odd political amalgam made to culture . . . Danubia is astoundingly smart and negotiates the Scylla of elegy and the Charybdis of denunciation with expert skill. It’s also damn funny, and includes dodos, the banning of cribs, cockatrices and the entire history of Europe’ Stuart Kelly, Scotland of Sunday
As the chapters roll past in their gales of hilarity, Winder manages at the same time to do something remarkably skilful, handling complex issues of geopolitics, national identity and cultural change with a deep and surprising thoughtfulness.
Sunday Telegraph, Book of the Week
Funny and yet also fantastically informative
Observer

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