The Fortress

The vividly written and well-researched The Fortress is a masterpiece. It deserves to become a classic of military history. – Lawrence James * The Times *
If you read one military history book this year, make it Alexander Watson’s The Fortress. – Tony Barber, Financial Times Summer Books of 2020
Superb, revelatory, haunting … he brings the suffocating, cataclysmic siege burningly alive … It is excellent history, a marvellously readable, though tragic, story of its time and of how the clock can be made to turn backwards under siege conditions. – Julian Evans * Daily Telegraph *
Alexander Watson tells this story beautifully, giving the reader a vivid sense of the city … His exposure of the breathtaking incompetence of the Austrian high command is both shocking and hilarious; his wit and keen sense of the ridiculous alternate with his evident compassion in describing this black farce … This is a hugely enjoyable book that anyone seeking to make sense of the dark side of 20th-century Europe would do well to read. – Adam Zamoyski * Literary Review *
Brilliantly researched and superbly written … Pryzemysl offered a bleak preview of what was coming: nationalism, anti-Semitism and a whirlwind of hatred. Grim stuff, but magnificently done. – Dominic Sandbrook * BBC History Magazine *
Marvellous … Watson uses the fortress city like a jeweller’s glass to show how war distorted and transformed the pre-war civilian world … Watson’s splendid book combines great evocative power (and flashes of sharp humour) with the ethical authority of the best history writing. – Christopher Clark * The Guardian *
Gripping … Watson’s book is an impressive telling of a story almost entirely unknown, and it makes clear how much we have yet to learn about the first world war away from the western front. – Mark Mazower * Financial Times *

Alexander Watson is the author of the prize-winning history of the Central Powers in the First World War, Ring of Steel. He is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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