New Statesman Books of the Year 2015 'Sublime ... it inspires a kind of evangelical cult passion among its followers' Simon Schama 'Roth is Austria's Chekhov' William Boyd. Strauss' Radetzky March, the signature tune of one of Europe's most powerful regimes, underpins Joseph Roth's account of three generations of the Trotta family in the years leading up to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918. The grandfather, the son, and the grandson are all equally dependent on the empire: the first for his elevation to nobility; the second for the bourgeois virtues that make him a meticulous servant of an administration whose failure he cannot comprehend or survive; the third for the family standards of behavior that he cannot attain, yet is too weakened to resist.