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My review of Derek Sayer’s Postcards from Absurdistan, his wide-ranging yet highly uneven account of 20th century Czech culture and the political storms it went through, has been published on Transitions Online. The book covers some very interesting, lesser-known writers, artists and architects as they navigated their way, personally and artistically, through independence, fascism, communism […]

“When the great actor Norinski entered the National Café, which is located in front of Prague’s Czech Theater, at three o’clock in the afternoon, he started a little – but then immediately smiled his most disdainful smile.” This is the opening line of the short story “King Bohush” by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in […]