LAST DAYS OF OLD EUROPE

TRIESTE ’79, VIENNA ’85, PRAGUE ’89

RICHARD BASSETT

Allen Lane, 207pp, £16.99

Most memoirs by former correspondents, argued Victor Sebestyen in the Evening Standard, suffer from narcissism or excessive padding. ‘A vastly enjoyable exception to the rule,’ he continued, ‘is Richard Bassett’s charming, imaginative and elegantly written memoir of his adventures in central Europe, for many years as a correspondent for the Times.’ Having already spent some time in Trieste, where the characters he encountered ranged from ‘the lady-in-waiting to Princess Sophie, wife of the Franz Ferdinand murdered in Sarajevo, to a

capo in the local mafia’, he moved to Llubljana, capital of Slovenia, where he joined the orchestra of the Slovenian National Opera Company as principal horn player.

Bassett joined the Times in his twenties as Central European correspondent in the last years of the Cold War and spent time in Vienna. ‘Bassett is rather less assured in the last third of the book when he turns to the revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet order in Central Europe’, because ‘his style of short, funny vignettes, filled with irony and eccentric characters, which works so well for most of the book, is less effective when he is trying to describe the big events of that extraordinary year’. Nonetheless, his book is ‘full of insight about the death of two empires, the Habsburg and the Soviet’. Despite being ‘the most terrible snob’, with a penchant for princesses and countesses, wrote David Aaronovitch in Bassett’s paper, the Times, he recaptures a particular moment in time brilliantly. ‘In the 1980s Richard Bassett was “our man” in central Europe, and a high old time he appears to have had. This memoir of that period and those places is nicely crafted and, at 193 pages (sans index), would happily accompany a bottle or two of Holzspur 2004 spread over a couple of winter evenings.’