Diaries of a Cosmopolitan, 1918-37

Known as the Red Count' because of his fiercely republican views, Count Harry Kessler was intensely involved in the art, politics and society of Weimar Germany. A writer of sharp perception and boundless curiosity, Harry Kessler wrote down everything as it happened. The diaries encompass an extraordinary variety of people. Josephine Baker dances naked in his drawing-room, Einstein engages him in long discussions about his theories, George Grosz contacts him from underground during the political troubles. Asquith and Cocteau, Diaghilev and Gide, Lloyd George and Richard Strauss, Rodin and Bernard Shaw, Eric Gill and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Virginia Woolf and Paul Valery, are among the people he knew and observed. He took a keen interest in politics. Alongside his artistic adventures are accounts of street fighting, the Spartacus uprising, the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, government upheavals, international disputes, elections and assassinations.