Richard Bassett

A major new biography of Maria Theresa, the formidable Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa: Empress presents the story of the single most powerful woman in eighteenth-century Europe. At just twenty-three, Maria Theresa succeeded to the Habsburg domains, only to find them contested by almost every power in Europe. Over the next forty years, she became a fierce leader and opponent, as...

The definitive history of Austria’s multinational army and its immense role during three centuries of European military history. Among the finest examples of deeply researched and colourfully written military history, Richard Bassett’s For God and Kaiser is a major account of the Habsburg army told for the first time in English. Bassett shows how the Imperial Austrian Army, time and...

The final decade of the Cold War, through the eyes of a laconic and elegant observer. In 1979 Richard Bassett set out on a series of adventures in central Europe, which allowed him to savour the last embers of the cosmopolitan old Hapsburg lands and gave him a ringside seat at the fall of another ancien regime, that of communist...