Wilhelm von Habsburg wore the uniform of an Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian exile, the decorations of the Order of the Golden Fleece and, every so often, a dress. He spoke the Italian of his archduke mother, the German of his archduke father, the English of his British royal friends, the Polish of the country his father wished to rule and the Ukrainian of the land Wilhelm wished to rule himself.

Timothy Snyder's masterful biography is not only a reconstruction of the life of this extraordinary man - a man who remained loyal to his Ukrainian dreams even after the country's dissolution in 1921- but also charts the final collapse of theancien regimein Europe and the rise of a new world order.

When Timothy Snyders bookBloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalinwas published in 2010, it quickly established its author as one of the leading historians of his generation, a scholar who combined formidable linguistic skills he reads or speaks 11 languages with an elegant literary style, white-hot moral passion and a willingness to start arguments about some of the most fraught questions of the recent past.New York Times

Timothy Snyder is Levin Professor of History at Yale University, and has written and edited a number of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history:Bloodlandswon the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities and the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Black Earthwas longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Snyder is a frequent contributor to theNew York Review of Booksand theTimes Literary Supplement. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, and sits on the advisory council of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research.