This book often felt like a guilty pleasure. The whole thing is just wondering around different European cities with a croissant in one hand, a coffee and novel/notebook in a satchel. Which by the way as soon as I get my mysterious inheritance from a long lost relative, you know the second cousin trice removed, that is what I plan to do - travel the world with coffee and different kinds of pastries.

I am a particular sucker when it comes to Europe in the first half the 20th century, and Zweig adds to my rose tinted glasses, for me this period is all high collars, experimental writing, waxed mustaches and hallucinogenic alcohol.

So yes this book was Awesome Sauce and I wallowed in it. Flights were quoted, restaurants trip advised and top ten lists cataloged. Reading becomes an especially expensive habit when the fantasy of travel is involved. But I always have to remember in my visit to Paris I was disappointed that no one was wearing top hats and walked with a cane.

Zweig may come off as pompous at times, okay, very pompous most of the time, but he is writing about the world he once knew, until Hitler came and f&@ked everything up. Hitler is the loaded gun in any narrative you are just waiting for him to go off in someone's hand.

There is a 'Brideshead Revisited' sentimentality too Zweig , he and Waugh are both lamenting a lost world like a divorcee drinking gin on the stairs (hence the pompousness). Though this is a sentimentality that is linked to nostalgia not emotional manipulation. While this turned Waugh bitter and Catholic, Zweig sadly took his own life in 1942, he never saw Hitler defeated. However, would Zweig have seen a Europe he recognized with the damaged Hitler inflicted, the true nature of the Holocaust, and Europe split by the Cold War, a man born in the 1880s wouldn't have lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rejoining of Europe. But this is playing the guessing game. This book is about a life lived through intellectualism, literature and travel. The good stuff in life.