Alan Sked is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of numerous books on British and Austrian history including The Survival of the Habsburg Empire. Radetzky, the Imperial Army and the Class War, 1848 (London and New York: Longman, 1979); The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815-1918 (London and New York: Longman. 1989); Metternich and Austria. An Evaluation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and most recently Radetzky. Imperial Victor and Military Genius (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).