'Incisive but comprehensive, entertaining and well-illustrated, this is the perfect introduction to what was once a huge empire and is now a small but (undeservedly) very lucky country' - TIM BLANNING Austria is a small country with a glorious history but a troubled past. It sits at the crossroads of central Europe: the furthest the Ottomans reached in the seventeenth century, a back-channel between east and west during the Cold War, and today a member of the European Union with its neutrality challenged by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In The Shortest History of Austria, Nicholas T. Parsons expertly tells the story of Austria from its origins at the outer reaches of the Roman Empire to its dominance of central Europe under the Habsburgs, and from the rebuilding of the republic after the devastation of World War II to the political tensions of today. As he ranges from the Romans to the Reformation, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the Anschluss, and from Mozart to Gustav Klimt to Harry Lime, Parsons reveals the drama of Austria's history and the crucial role that the country has played in the story of Europe. AUTHOR: Nicholas T. Parsons is the author of Blue Guide Austria and Vienna: A Cultural and Literary History, as well as Worth the Detour, a history of the guidebook as a literary genre, and The Joy of Bad Verse, a celebration of successfully bad poets. His most recent books are Civilisation and its Malcontents (2019) and Democracy: A Narrative from Aristotle to Trump (2023). For thirty years, he has been writing about Central Europe, and in particular Austria, which he regards as a second home.