They Were Counted

Just about as good as any fiction I have ever read, like Anna Karenina and War and Peace rolled into one. Love, sex, town, country, money, power, beauty, and the pathos of a society which cannot prevent its own destruction - all are here – Charles Moore * Daily Telegraph *
Fascinating. He writes about his quirky border lairds and squires and the high misty forest ridges and valleys of Transylvania with something of the ache that Czeslaw Milosz brings to the contemplation of this lost Eden – W. L. Webb * Guardian *
Pleasure of a different scale and kind. It is a sort of Galworthian panorama of life in the dying years of the Habsburg Empire - perfect late night reading for nostalgic romantics like me – Jan Morris * Observer “Books of the Year” *
Full of arresting descriptions, beautiful evocations of scenery and wise political and moral insights – Francis King * Spectator *
So enjoyable, so irresistible, it is the author’s keen political intelligence and refusal to indulge in self-deception which give it an unusual distinction. It’s a novel that, read at the gallop for sheer enjoyment, is likely to carry you along. But many will want to return to it for a second, slower reading, to savour its subtleties and relish the author’s intelligence – Allan Massie * Scotsman *
Like Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, Miklós Bánffy is one of those novelists Austria-Hungary specialised in. Intimate and sparkling chroniclers of a wider ruin, ironic and elegiac, they understood that in the 1900s the fate of classes and nations was beginning to turn almost on a change in the weather … Bánffy, a prime witness of his times, shows in these memoirs exactly what an extraordinary period it must have been to live through – Julian Evans * Daily Telegraph *
Although comparisons with Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard are inevitable, Banffy’s work is perhaps nearer in feel to that of Joseph Roth, in The Radetzky March. They were, after all, mourning the fall of the same empire – Ruth Pavey * New Statesman *

Count Miklos Banffy (1873-1950) was a diplomat, MP, and foreign minister (1921-22), during which he signed the peace treaty with the United States and obtained Hungary’s admission to the League of Nations. He organized the last Habsburg coronation, that of King Karl in 1916. His famous “The Writing on the Wall” trilogy was first published in Budapest in the 1930s and rediscovered internationally after the fall of communism. This epic work has been translated into ten languages.

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