Lajos Zilahy was already a very successful and widely translated author when he embarked on his trilogy about an aristocratic Hungarian family, the Dukays, from 1814 down to the Second World War. A minor aristocrat himself, he was born in 1891 and wrote his first book, a collection of poems, when he was recovering from serious injuries he had received on the Russian front during the First World War. His views on social reform and his refusal to join any political party made him enemies in the Hungarian press and among the Nazi occupying forces, who were about to arrest him when he managed to go into hiding in a cellar in Budapest, with his wife and son. It was here, in 1944, that he started on the trilogy.

His democratic views were equally unpopular with the post-war Communist regime and three years later he fled with his family to the United States, where he finished the novels and translated them, with some help, into English. So the books were first published in English. This is the first in the sequence, though it was written and published after the other two. It appeared in English in 1965 (the first two had come out in 1949 and 1953) and in Hungarian four years later.

This very readable first volume, which can be enjoyed as a single novel, opens with the birth of twins to the Hungarian Count Endre Dukay and his young wife Jadi, a Polish countess. The boys have been born into a fabulously wealthy family who own a Baroque palace in Vienna, a vast estate in the Hungarian countryside and a small Renaissance palace in the Hungarian capital Buda. Their place and date of birth are highly symbolic: Vienna, 1 October 1814, the opening day of the Congress of Vienna, the international conference that decided on the future of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. The boys’ father is one of the resplendently uniformed secretaries to the Congress’s prime mover, the Austrian foreign minister Prince Metternich, who appears in the novel alongside a host of historical figures, including his counterparts at the Congress, the (comically portrayed) Russian tsar Alexander I, Britain’s foreign secretary Viscount Castlereagh and the French statesman Talleyrand.

Metternich agrees to be godfather to the eldest twin Antal, who is nicknamed Flexi. As the novel progresses, this docile, blond-haired, blue-eyed boy is brought up in Austria and comes to represent the conservatives who are loyal to the ruling Habsburg dynasty. His twin Adalbert, nicknamed Dali, an unruly youngster with dark hair and black eyes, is sent to Hungary at the age of ten and in due course becomes an ardent Hungarian patriot fighting to free Hungary from its Austrian masters.

We follow Dali as he travels round Europe, starting in Poland, then moving on to Russia, where he falls in love with an actress, Dushenka, and manages to marry her, despite the fact that the Tsar is determined to make her his mistress. In 1848, the ‘Year of Revolutions’, Dali joins the great Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the Hungarian revolution against the Habsburgs and eventually, after the revolution has been crushed, flees with him and the remnants of his patriotic army to exile in Turkey. By one of those ironies of history, it is the pro-Habsburg Flexi Dukay who helps Hungary to achieve independence. The novel ends with the death of the elderly Flexi in 1896, during Hungary’s millennial celebrations, followed by a brief scene in which, eighteen years later — and virtually a century since the birth of the twins — Germany declares war in Russia, on 1 August 1914. The First World War is about to begin.

All this is told in a colourful, quite popular style, full of comic touches and historical detail — the descriptions of clothing and uniforms are particularly striking — and with such verve that even without much knowledge of the historical events you are swept along by the story and by the larger-than-life characters who people it.

At five-thirty Endre was dressed in his full hussar uniform — tight vermilion trousers, richly trimmed cornflower-blue dolman, high shako tied to his left shoulder by a thick golden cord, and lute-shaped sabretache, in which he kept a number of items indispensable for a young cavalry captain travelling in dangerous France; a dozen balls and gunpowder for the oversized pistol hanging on his right hip, an ivory-bound prayer book, crested writing paper, a violet wax stick for seals, mostly for poetic love letters to petty mon amour, and a small bottle containing a less poetic specific against gonorrhoea.

As he walked in his bright uniform toward the breakfast room, he resembled something between a figure in a gothic stained-glass window and a male bird of paradise. His dignified steps were accompanied by the soft music of his silver spurs and the complaining creak of his citrine boots.

After the Napoleonic wars, coffee and sugar were scarce in France. Breakfast at the Hotel Fontenoy consisted of herb tea, black bread and, as a special luxury, a chestnut-sized stock of brown sugar hanging at the end of a long string above each table. While drinking his tea, each guest had the right to hold the sugar in his mouth for a few seconds, then pass it on to his neighbour. 5