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Beginning with the final decades of the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire, Stephen Pogany explores the lives of his mother's family in Budapest and in the spa town of Balatonfüred. Drawing on a wide range of historical and literary sources, as well as extended interviews with family members and Holocaust survivors, Modern Times examines the reality of Hungarian-Jewish life in the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to the familiar tropes that portray Jews as wealthy and privileged, many of Hungary's Jews, like most of the ones we encounter in this memoir, toiled at menial jobs for low pay while facing growing prejudice and discrimination in the years leading up to the Holocaust.

"My ever dear friend. As I may now do so with safety, I will try to write to you the sad particulars of the dreadful wreck of the Kite. May the Almighty in mercy strengthen me for the truly melancholy duty. Amen." So begins a remarkable account of five months spent as a prisoner during the First Opium War (1839-42). Anne Watson was born in 1814 in Wiltshire, but after a sea-voyage turned to tragedy it was as the shipwrecked and widowed 'Mrs Noble' that she became a household name. Held hostage while the Qing dynasty negotiated the withdrawal of British troops from Chinese soil, her treatment scandalized the public, influenced the course of the war, and years later was still the subject of theatrical entertainments and newspaper stories. A devoted wife and mother who sailed tens of thousands of miles across four continents, Anne's resilience forces us to reassess our ideas of what life was like for "ordinary" women during the mid-nineteenth century.