After a childhood marked by loss and grief, Hölderlin studied theology in the illustrious company of Hegel and Schelling, before concentrating on poetry and writing his most famous work, Hyperion. But, afflicted by the pressures of life and a doomed love affair, he gradually went mad, and spent the final thirty-six years of his life in a solitary tower in Tübingen, cared for by a kindly carpenter. The younger poet Wilhelm Waiblinger (1804–30) was one of the few people to gain Hölderlin's c...

'He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.'Stefan Zweig was already an émigré-driven from a Europe torn apart by brutality and totalitarianism-when he found, in a damp cellar, a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne would become Zweig's last great occupation, helping him make sense of his own life and his obsessions-with personal freedom, with the sanctity of the individual. Through his writings on suicide, he would also, fi...

A compelling portrait of one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, by one of the bestselling writers of the twentieth In this vivid biographical study, Zweig eschews traditional academic discussion and focuses on Nietzsche's habits, passions and obsessions. Concentrating on the man rather than the work, on his tragic isolation and volatile creativity, Zweig draws the reader inexorably into the drama of Nietzsche's life.

A collection of the great writer's observations, made during his travels across the Europe he loved so much When I am on a journey, all ties suddenly fall away. I feel myself quite unburdened, disconnected, free - there is something in it marvellously uplifting and invigorating. Whole past epochs suddenly return: nothing is lost, everything still full of inception, enticement. For the insatiably curious, ardent Europhile Stefan Zweig, travel was both a necessary cultural education and a pe...

A new collection of essays by Stefan Zweig: tributes to the great artists and thinkers of the Europe of his day Stefan Zweig was a born eulogist. In this collection of powerful elegies, homages and personal memories, Zweig forms a richly interconnected portrait of key creative figures in the European cultural diaspora up to 1939. Many of those mourned or celebrated here cast a long spiritual shadow over Zweig's own writing life: Verhaeren, Rolland, Nietzsche, Roth, Mahler, Rilke and Freud....

A new translation by acclaimed poet Will Stone of the visionary Austrian poet Georg Trakl Georg Trakl is recognised as one of the most important European poets of the twentieth century. His visionary poetry has influenced not only later poets but also composers, artists and filmmakers. The full measure of Trakl's genius can be appreciated in this extensive Collected Poems, intuitively translated by poet Will Stone, which features the key collections including the posthumously published Seb...

'I owe Betz infinite gratitude...a first-rate poet, a creative spirit, and a friend to all creative spirits...an ornament to literary France...an artist with words, lovable and worthy of love' - Thomas Mann'Maurice Betz is one of those artists whose importance only fully appears after they have disappeared' - Marcel AyméWalking in the Luxembourg Garden, describing encounters with enigmatic diva Eleonora Duse or an irascible Tolstoy: Rainer ...

Although the Austrian poet Georg Trakl was born over a century ago, the mesmerising imagery and haunting visions of his highly sensitive and morbidly introspective poetry are as powerful today as they were when he poured forth his extraordinary and unclassifiable volume of work. A source of inspiration for artists, musicians and writers throughout the Expressionist period and beyond, Trakl's poetry – bleak, yet full of tenderness and hope, nightmarish yet eeriely beautiful...

A powerful collection written on the eve of the destruction of Europe by the Second World War, by the great Joseph Roth In January 1933, on the very day Hitler seized power in Germany, Joseph Roth fled to Paris. There, in what he called the 'hour before the end of the world', he wrote a series of articles. The end he foresaw would soon come to pass in the full horror of Hitler's barbarism, the Second World War and most crucially for Roth, the final irreversible destruction of a pan-Europea...

A quartet of essays on great European cities from the groundbreaking thinker Georg Simmel 'Vnice possesses the ambiguous beauty of adventure, floating rootlessly through life, like a torn flower borne on the sea' Georg Simmel was a brilliant, groundbreaking thinker, whose wide-ranging lectures held audiences spellbound in turn-of-the-century Berlin and throughout Europe. The theories of this maverick 'wandering-priest' left their mark on a whole generation of philosophers, poets and sociol...

A collection of haunting, mystical poems of the night by the great Rainer Maria Rilke, appearing together for the first time in English In 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke presented his friend Rudolf Kassner with a notebook, containing twenty-two poems meticulously inscribed in his own hand and bearing the title Poems to Night. This evocative sequence of poems, which echoes some of the great themes of German romanticism, is now thought to represent one of the key stages in the creative breakthroug...

For fifteen years, after his first visit to the country in1876, Nietzsche was repeatedly and irresistibly drawn back to Italy's climate and lifestyle. It was there that he composed his most famous works, including Thus Spake Zarathustra and Ecce Homo.This classic biography follows the troubled philosopher from Rome, to Florence, via Venice, Sorrento, Genoa, Sicily and finally to the tragic denouement in Turin, the city in which Nietzsche found a final measure of c...