Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, by Derek Sayer, Princeton University Press, 752 pp, £38, ISBN: 978-0691185453, ISBN: 978-0691239514 (e-book) Postcards from Absurdistan is the third volume in a ‘loose trilogy of cultural histories’ in which Derek Sayer has argued that European modernity is best examined from a vantage point located, both literally and figuratively, in Bohemia and its capital, Prague. The first volume, The Coasts of Bohemia (1998), tackled the issue of national identity. It presented Czech history – from its mythic beginnings to just after the communist takeover in 1948 – as a lesson on the nature of national historiography. When a ‘small’ nation has, for most of its past, struggled for recognition, its history is bound to consist of attempts to re-invent the past in order to assure itself of a future. The form of this reassurance: a bricolage of national treasures assembled largely under the motto ‘small but ours’. Focusing on the main tropes of the Czech National Revival – especially the emphasis on the Czech language as the basis for national identity, and the encoding of Czechness as something anti-German, anti-aristocratic and anti-Catholic – Sayer presents this chequered history as a corrective to the national histories of bigger, older, more secure nations. A lot of what he marks out as specifically Czech, however, sounds very familiar in the Irish context. None better than the Czechs at understanding Irish people’s fondness for the ‘best little country in the world’ trope (including its associated ironies) and the pitfalls of turning a language into a crux of nationality. In the second volume, Prague as the Capital of the Twentieth Century (2013), Sayer shifted focus to the...

Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator, by Paul Corner, Oxford University Press, 179 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-0192866646 The Pope At War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini & Hitler, by David I Kertzer, Oxford University Press, 621 pp, £25, ISBN 978-0192890733 I begin writing this review on a day (October 13th, 2022), in the month of the hundredth anniversary of Mussolini’s march on Rome, when the presidency of the Italian senate passed from Liliana Segre, a survivor of Auschwitz, the only one of her family to return, to a man who collects fascist memorabilia and whose father was a secretary of the fascist party in the 1940s. The new president, Ignazio Maria Benito La Russa, can be seen in several Youtube videos making the fascist salute (as in this one ‑ at around 1.00). And this afternoon, I stepped into our local baker’s to pick up some focaccia and was greeted by a chorus of fury from the two women who own the place: do they remember nothing, was their demand. Italy, at least the Italy that I know, is in a kind of mourning. In the focacceria they are hoping that we will shake ourselves. Scendiamo in piazza, they said, a beautiful, seemingly simple expression which literally means ‘let’s descend into the piazza’ but which actually means ‘Let’s organise, let’s march, let’s protest’, because the piazza is the public space. To say something is in piazza is to say that it is being talked about publicly. The piazza is the public memory. ‘Memory,’ Paul Corner suggests, ‘concerns the ways in which people construct a sense of the past ... It does not depend on documents or archives ... Yet...

The Way We Die Now, by Seamus O’Mahony, Head of Zeus, 292 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-1784974268 Nothing is as certain in life as death. Despite this certainty and the various kinds of death on offer, humans have little choice as to how or when their deaths will occur. Rational thought tells us that death is both natural and uncontrollable, yet humans have nevertheless attempted to master or outwit it for centuries. Until recently, these attempts to make sense of death or to keep it at bay rested on folklore, myth, religion and superstitions now largely seen as out of step with modern lifestyles. We now find it ridiculous that someone might wear an amulet against evil spirits or that a person might speak of seeing a wailing banshee, foretelling the death of a family member, or that any kind of tarot reading or tea leaf prediction might be taken as a serious warning of imminent death. Instead we put our trust in medicine and believe that technological advances and experimental procedures will save us, while preventative medicine and healthy living will provide us with the key to eternal life. Our faith in medicine is so strong that even dying patients remain under its spell, and, sometimes unaware that they are dying, pass into oblivion under the influence of morphine or subjected to the pain and stress of ineffective medical procedures which leave behind a bruised, battered and bloody corpse. This is not how it was supposed to happen, we might think, but we cannot quite envision how death was supposed to go, in part because we are unwilling to confront our mortality or that of our loved ones. Older societies had...