The Red Prince

This is the first ever biography of the extraordinarily colourful Archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg (1895-1947). Tattooed, bisexual, crossdressing, multilingual, he was a major - and symbolic - figure in 20th-century European culture and politics. Born into one of the great European dynasties with every expectation of a glittering future, instead he became a playboy in Paris during the 1930s and died - a spy for Britain - under interrogation in a Soviet prison. The arc of Wilhelm's life therefore describes the dying fall of the ancient regime - the Europe of his birth bears very little resemblance to that of his death.Operating largely in inter-war Europe, Wilhelm is like a Le Carre character - a prisoner of private impulses that drove him to a doomed secret war. To the history of the Second World War the book adds a detailed discussion of Hitler's confrontation with a particular object of his loathing - the Habsburg family. A major subject of the book is Soviet communism and it's effect on the individual; cf Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate and A Writer at War. This is a book of exceptional brilliance and originality - it cites documents from 20 archives and in 12 languages; each chapter title is a different colour.

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Timothy Snyder received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997. He has held fellowships in Paris and Vienna, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He has written and edited a number of critically-acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history, including The Reconstruction of Nations and Sketches from a Secret War. He teaches at Yale University.

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