Some novels creep up quietly on you from behind, while others grasp you firmly by the collar and sweep you briskly into their firmament, barely giving you time to catch your breath. The Radetzky March is certainly among the latter, and I duly succumbed within pages, when I discovered it gently simmering with potential on a holiday bookshelf (other people’s bookshelves always simmer with more potential than one’s own). Holidays are, by definition, an attempt to embrace the unfamiliar, and this novel’s very title, so redolent of Mitteleuropa, promises immersion in a different world, the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire on the fringes of which its author, Joseph Roth, led his own doomed and self-destructive life.