Love in a Time of Hate

Florian Illies is a writer, editor, and art historian and the author of five international bestsellers, including 1913: The Year before the Storm. He lives in Berlin.

Simon Pare is a translator from French and German who lives near Zurich. His translation of The Flying Mountain by Christoph Ransmayr made the Man Booker International Prize longlist in 2018, and he was part of the team that translated The Panama Papers into English.

A brilliantly conceived and uniquely different cultural history of the 1930s, written with confident, alluring poise. Fascinating and revelatory
An enthralling and insightful cultural history - one that shows how, over the course of one pivotal decade, love, freedom and the freedom to love gave way to fear, madness and despair
Florian Illies's whirling cultural history, Love in a Time of Hate, captures an era of unmatched hedonism ... there's the thrill of discovery on every page
The experimental sex lives of the artists and thinkers of the roaring 20s are set against the burgeoning threat of fascism in this wickedly amusing and timely book
Partly as a result of the book's organising conceit, and Illies's often arch prose style, Love in a Time of Hate achieves something that is really rather impressive - turning the great moral dramas of the 20th century into breathless melodrama.
A brilliantly readable and evocative social history ... beginning with the build up to the Great Depression and ending with the outbreak of war, Florian Illies's superb new book explores the complicated personal and creative lives ofeveryone from Marlene Dietrich and the Mann family to Salvador Dalí, and F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
It takes a skilful hand to arrange these vignettes into a dramatic image of the world slipping into catastrophe ... This erudite history covers much ground
In a revealing, offbeat slice of cultural history, Florian Illies traces the tangled affairs of Europe's intelligentsia against the backdrop of the rise of fascism ... Illies, a German writer, brings a light touch and conversational style to his mosaic view of a pivotal period ... he astutely weaves these diverse stories into a fluent, widescreen narrative
Engaging ... Illies immerses us in a stream of gossip and political rumour, in love affairs past and present, somehow carried on amid great personal achievements and terrible folly. There is a Freudian element and no little writerly brilliance in the way Illies asks: what did these people mean by love? ... This, then, was Europe in love
Highly novelistic ... wisecracking ... skilfully composed
A cultural history of some of the 1930s greatest love stories, interwoven with the darkening backdrop of fascism in Europe
Love in a Time of Hate invites us to consider that history is as much an accretion of small gestures as it is a catalogue of battles and speeches. At once intimate and epic, this dazzling book illuminates the human desire to seek connection and coherence as the world descends into chaos. A brilliant and imaginative tour de force
Set against the relentless rise of Nazi terror, this ingenious narrative evokes the 1930s through the loves, foibles and tragedies of the cultural elite. Strikingly original, utterly absorbing.
Please do read this book - it is gorgeous. I learned so many new things about love, art and the horror of history
This is candid, unsparing and gripping social history viewed through the prism of two- and three-person relationships - simultaneously disenchanting and endearing. A bravura performance
Praise for Florian Illies: 'Illies is as astute a researcher as he is an observer of the zeitgeist
A vivid, richly textured book that chronicles a world crackling with talent, energy and foreboding
An absolute gem of a book
Thorough and fascinating