A book of entirely delicious quality...Everything is new, cool, witty, elegant.—Evelyn Waugh.The Kaiser's Germany is the setting of Sybille Bedford's first and best-known novel, in which two families—one from solid, upholstered Jewish Berlin, the other from the somnolent, agrarian Catholic South —become comically, tragically, irrevocably intertwined. "Each family," writes the author, "stood confident of being able to go on with what was theirs, while in fact they were playthings, often victims, of the now united Germany and what was brewing therein." Did the monstrous thing that followed have its foundation in families such as these? "Writing about them made me think so. Hence the title." Author Biography: Sybille Bedford was born in 1911, in Charlottenburg, Germany, and was brought up in Italy, England, and France. Best known as a novelist and travel writer, she has also written journalistic accounts of political and criminal trials and a life of her mentor Aldous Huxley. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a vice president of English PEN, Mrs. Bedford lives in London and is currently at work on a memoir.