The Last Palace: Europe’s Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House. By Norman Eisen.Crown; 403 pages; $28. Headline; £25.
AMBASSADORIAL residences are silent witnesses to history, home to generations of diplomats, venues for endless dinners. Some are architectural gems: the German residence in Delhi, the British one in Washington, the Dutch in Beijing. Norman Eisen, now of the Brookings Institute, a think-tank, reckons the American residence in Prague is exceptional, too. He became enamoured of it while living there as America’s ambassador to the Czech Republic. His account of the building intersperses pen portraits of its occupants with a biography of his mother. A supporter of Czechoslovakia’s tolerant founding president, Tomas Masaryk, she was born the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi in a remote, poor town.
The 100-room palace has little architectural merit; its...
from The Economist: Books and arts https://ift.tt/2Nn15T7
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