MY DANCING WHITE HORSES

The equestrian pomp and circumstance of the recent British Royal Wedding has reminded Boris of another book whose reading is incomplete: Alois Podhajsky's "My Dancing White Horses".

An autobiography by the former, and perhaps best known, director of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, this book deals with the tumultuous events of the first part of the twentieth century from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire as a consequence of the First World War, through events leading to World War II, to the re-building of Europe in its aftermath.

"My Dancing White Horses" is testimony to how a great passion - in Podhajsky's case horses and the Spanish Riding School - can sustain people through the most difficult circumstances.