‘You know, I really like the Archduke’, King George V is said to have commented after entertaining Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Windsor inNovember 1913, just eight months before they were assassinated at Sarajevo. Not all of King George’s subjects would have shared his view; nor did the Archduke’s liking for King George extend to the majority of his subjects or his Empire.

This lecture by British historian Francis Roy Bridge seeks to illuminate, in the light of private papers and other archive material, a subject that reflected something of the ambivalence of relations between the British and Austro-Hungarian monarchies themselves in the decade or so before they went to war with each other, for the first and last time, in 1914.

Francis Roy Bridge is considered a doyen of historical research of Austrian diplomatic and military history in the UK. He began his career as a scholar in 1964 at the London School of Economics. Since then, he has worked intensively on the topic of Austrian history – especially the history of the Habsburg monarchy – as part of his teaching as well as a researcher, mainly at the School of History at the University of Leeds.

Venue: Sheikh Zayed Lecture Theatre (downstairs in the New Academic Building, Lincoln's Inn Fields) of the LSE