Allan Massie

Prague Calling

Notes from Underground

By

Beaufort Books 244pp £14.72 order from our bookshop

Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia

By

Melville House 276pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

Europe has no centre. If you had to choose one, it might as well be Prague as anywhere else. Geographically, it is central. Historically, it was there that the terrible Thirty Years War began, there that the Nazi invasion six months after the Munich Agreement made the Second World War all but inevitable, there too that the so-called Prague Spring of 1968 set in motion the slow crumbling of the Soviet Empire, as faith in Communism seeped away.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • In this month's Silenced Voices, Lucy Popescu shines a light on Myanmar's persecution of writers and journalists, p… ,
    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    • 'Readers have no more power to predict where the next story is going to take them than the prisoners had to determi… ,
    Follow Us