John Hughes
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 4 Jun
John Hughes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And finally, his son, Karl Josef, who is the last in the line, if you like.
And Karl Josef is characterised as somehow sort of paralysed by life, doesn't really know what to do with himself or seems incapable often of making decisions for himself.
He, in particular, he's intimidated by the idea of living up to the memory of that heroic grandfather.
He grows up looking at the portrait of this grandfather, so literally having to try and live up to the image of the grandfather and failing to do that mainly.
He becomes a career soldier, but seems wholly unsuitable for that role, unsuited for that role.
And he seems also incapable of making any lasting relationships in his life.
So there were some quite negative or almost morbid themes that run through the novel.
And it also plays with the musical motif of the title, which is, of course, a reference to Johann Strauss Senior's famous Victory March.
But in the novel, it functions almost an ironic accompaniment to the terminal decline of the empire.
Yeah, just briefly, I mean, on what makes the novel great.
What I enjoy really about it, despite those negative themes, it's the evocation of a lost world, really.
It's those incredibly detailed descriptions of formal occasions, of the sort of rituals of empire and the military.
We get descriptions of uniforms, parades.
duels, formal dinners, drunken parties, but also a sense of place as well.
So Vienna in its sort of imperial pomp, and also Brody as well.
I mean, the second half of the novel is essentially set in a Galician border town that draws on all of those memories of Hort's childhood.
She did.
I mean, it was actually the novel that preceded Radetzky March, as it happens, and could be said to have been the artistic turning point for him, the one that allowed him to... gave him the confidence, I think, to write the Radetzky March.
So it was published in 1930.
Before Radetzky March.
Showing 81–100 of 199 · page 5 of 10
← Previous
Next →