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Books

The honour of the Habsburgs was all that mattered to the imperial Austrian army

Talleyrand should not have sneered at the Austrian regiments — they actually won a surprising number of battles, as Richard Bassett’s For God and Kaiser shows

20 June 2015

9:00 AM

20 June 2015

9:00 AM

For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army Richard Bassett

Yale, pp.568, £25, ISBN: 9780300178586

John Keegan, perhaps the greatest British military historian of recent years, felt that the most important book (because of its vast scope) that remained unwritten was a history of the Austrian army. Richard Bassett has now successfully filled the gap, and few could be better qualified to do so. During many years as the Times’s correspondent in Vienna, Rome and Warsaw, he made friends with most of the leading local experts, as his acknowledgements testify.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £20 Tel: 08430 600033. John Jolliffe is the translator of Froissart’s Chronicles and the editor of Raymond Asquith: Life and Letters.

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