Walter Perrie

“As the nineteenth century progressed, Austria-Hungary took refuge in reaction at home and adventurism abroad in an effort to contain the centrifugal forces which eventually blew it, and much of Europe, apart. Austria, and Vienna in particular, was the real home of Central-European anti-semitism. Jews wew bottom of the pile. No matter how low you sank, the Jews were still below you, along with the gypsies. At the tail-end of the nineteenth century, the Viennese politician Karl Lueger founded his power base on an anti-semitic platform. Stories of ritual murder by Jewish cabals featured regularly in the Viennese gutter press. It is no accident that Schickelgruber, the faied artist who became Hitler, should have neen the son of a petty official and have spent his ambitions at the butt end of Viennese snobbery.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe

“My father had one special hero: William III, King of Great Britain and Ireland and Prince of Orange. To my father the Dutchman, by smashing the forces of James II at the Boyne and, more decisively, at Aughrim on 12 July 1691, saved the country from an Irish-Catholic tyranny of popish servitude, idolatry and nameless superstition. Those battles were not events of long ago which no longer mattered. Rather, they were of decisive moment in how we lived from day to day and deserved the commemoration of daily objects, so that William's figure, seated on his prancing white charger, sword-arm raised in a gesture of advance, decorated tea-towels and plates.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe