Last Days in Old EuropeThe 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 rule. From Trieste to Prague and Vienna to Warsaw, fading aristocrats, charming gangsters, fractious diplomats, and