Hedy Lamarr  born  Hedwig Kiesler the daughter of a Ukrainian banker father and a Hungarian aristocratic pianist mother, both assimilated Viennese Jews shot to central European infamy as the first woman to feign orgasm on screen in the 1933 film Ecstasy and dubbed as “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of her frequency hopping technology in 2014. Her husband, the rich Austrian industrialist Friedrich  Mandl, was not impressed, when he went on to make weapons for the Nazis. She drugged her maid and scarpered out of the window of his castle, and boarded a mid-=Atlantic Ocean liner and surpassed decades of glittering Hollywood fiction. She outlived all six of her spouses  even the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes never made it to the altar with her. She also suggested improvements for the aerofoils of his Spruce Goose flying boat and went on to design a cutting-edge guidance system for torpedoes and tried to give it to the US Navy who passed  because of her German background.

Richard Cockett, historian, a member of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, a lecturer in history and politics at the University of London, a staff correspondent and senior editor at The Economist, traces Vienna’s rich intellectual history from psychoanalysis to Reganomics,  architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens, espionage to modern ceramics, highlights how one city shaped the modern world – and how we remain inescapably Viennese. Crockett vividly demonstrates, brewed the richness and boldness of the modern era.

The city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler and Klimt was the melting pot at the heart of vast metropolitan empire.  With the advent of the Second World War and the rise of fascism, the dazzling coteries of thinker who squabbled, debated and called Vienna home dispersed across the world, where the ideas continued to have profound impact.

Austria is not only  a winsome land of “Mozart Bonbons”, Lipizzaner horses but basically insignificant myths is also the central point of pre-war Vienna  with a cauldron of ideas mostly extinguished in Austria, but exported to the Anglo-American world.

History dwelt on the great artistic outpouring of Vienna before the calamity of the first World War all sex and death, as Cockett focuses on the inter war period and highlight how enduringly influential it has been on western culture and how spirited Viennese that moulded the contours of the consumer-capitalist world order, the genesis of Maddison Avenue advertising ( Herta Herzog, Ernest Dichter, shopping mall (Victor Gruen), Corporate management theory (Peter Drucker), sexual awakening of western youth  ( Wilhelm Reich). Cockett acknowledges in Black Vienna- the Conservative antonym to socialist “red Vienna”, and describes the conservative philosopher  and sociologist Othmar Spann, the most celebrated academic in Vienna.

Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World by Richard Crockett, Yale £25, 464 pages.