Orlando Figes vividly captures the 19th-century cultural blossoming of Europe in this story of a diva, her husband and her literary lover
In 2016, as Theresa May sought to demonstrate her Brexit credentials, she mocked the tendency of some high-minded liberals to describe themselves as “citizens of the world”. A better description, she observed acidly, would be “citizen of nowhere”.
Not long afterwards, Orlando Figes, whose mother fled Nazi Germany in 1939, tweeted that he had decided to become a German citizen “bec [sic] I don’t want to be a Brexit Brit”. Presumably, he then returned with renewed urgency to complete this impassioned 576-page account of how European culture broke down the borders of the mind in the 19th century. A project he had worked on for years had suddenly become a symbol of resistance to the new nationalism.
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