The end

of a huge trilogy, which describes the collapse of a complex, archaic world of Hungarian aristocracy in Romania and the disintegration into 1914. I'd forgotten that it was a month from the shooting of Franz-Ferdinand until the first of several declarations of war.

Leigh Fermor's magical phrases light up the foreword, dated 'Chatsworth, Boxing Day 1998'. He describes how in 1934 he drifted amongst the "old Hungarian land-owners [who] felt stranded and ill-used by history... with the phantoms of their lost ascendancy still about them, the prevailing atmosphere conjured up the tumbling demesnes of the Anglo-Irish in Waterford or Galway, with all their sadness and their magic."

Echoes too of "Le Grand Meaulnes"

Banffy, a diplomat, organised the last Habsburg coronation in 1916, and lived on until 1950.