Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

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.
It is the history of a dynasty, but it is at least as much about the people they ruled, who spoked many different languages, lived in a vast range of landscapes, believed in may rival gods and often showed a marked ingratitude towards their oddball ruler in Vienna.