“ ‘The congress danced’ became an enduring comment on the great victors’ conference that apportioned spoils of Napoleon’s defeat at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Some of the most piquant political and cultural cotillions of that fateful gala took place in the salon of Fanny von Arnstein, the Jewish baroness whose life and times Hilde Spiel has conjured brilliantly in this book.”

Frederic Morton, author of A Nervous Splendor, Thunder at Twilight and The Rothschilds