Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that 'was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history'. Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about. Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer whose life connected with James Joyce, Richard Strauss, Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hitler - among many others. He was, essentially, a European of the old school, and his last book, "The World of Yesterday", testifies to this. Zweig was born in 1881; he lived to see the continent torn apart by two world wars and committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 when, after the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, he came to believe that a Nazi world was inevitable. "The World of Yesterday" was written shortly before his suicide and was intended as a literary capsule to remind future generations of the world that they had lost, and how that loss had come about. The main trajectory of the book is from an old world of seeming 'security' in which notions of peace, dignity and learning reigned, to the new world of war in which Hitler had destroyed all of these things. Zweig provides a vivid portrait of how war and terror can sweep over a people who are seemingly oblivious to what is happening to them. The process, in Zweig's view, vindicates the apparent pessimism of his friend Sigmund Freud - who believes that culture could never overcome the subconscious and malevolent desires of a people. Zweig lost almost everything he had to the Nazis. He was an Austrian jew who fled because he knew what was coming. The book is written entirely from memory. Its language consequently tends to lurch from the high flown and sentimental, to chillingly accurate vignettes of how a people can delude themselves about a catastrophe in their midst. He manages to convey his horror when, on his final visit to Austria, he realised that none of his friends and family could imagine the worst that could happen - and hence did not believe his exhortations to leave while they could: 'They invited each other to full-dress parties (little thinking that they would soon be wearing prisoner's clothes in a concentration camp)'.

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as
and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including
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is an uncompromising account of Gregor von Rezzori's aristocratic childhood in Romania in the days before World War II.
He was born in Czernowitz, a one-time provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was later to be absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine—a town that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of astonishing diversity. Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his aristocratic parents, and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear.
The book is a series of portraits—amused, fond, sometimes appalling—of Rezzori’s family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by marriage, destructively obsessed with her children’s health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid, who introduced Rezzori to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance

During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s
to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.