Literature

The Two Milan Kunderas

History

Bohemian Encounters

Ideas

Writers United

The pros and cons of bringing writers together in a corporate body

Literature

The Destruction Principle

A working class striver and skiver in one, at home with the underdog

Literature

A Great Worker

The work which, 100 years ago, gave us the concept of the robot

Velvet Resolution

Hermione Lee’s authorised biography of Tom Stoppard gives us, between the lines, the sense of a man who, while charming, could be driven and sometimes…

World Literature

The China in Us

Is ‘pragmatism’ toward China really a permission Europeans give themselves to revert to uses of power that are an inherent part of European history? Can…

World Literature

There Will Be Order

László Krasznahorkai’s new novel, ‘Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming’, reveals the kind of dynamic, both economic and emotional-spiritual, that has facilitated Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian ‘koronadiktatúra’, a form…

World Politics

Trooping the velvet

November 1989 in Prague is remembered by its foot soldiers as a dizzying succession of demonstrations and hopeful propaganda expeditions into the provinces. No one…

World Literature

Ding Dong, the Witch Might Be Dead

The Testaments is undeniably a testament to Margaret Atwood’s literary mastery. She has produced the modern equivalent of a traditional fairy tale – a young…

World Literature

Life, Death, Clean Water

By the 1990s, seven prose works by the Hungarian writer Magda Szabó had appeared in French, ten in Czech and seventeen in German, while there…

World Literature

Where Yesterday Haunts Tomorrow

A lively account based on the fluctuating fortunes of one Russian-Armenian family illuminates the varying impact of large-scale historical developments in specific locations and on…

World Literature

The Sorry Earthmen of Bohemia

Three recently published Czech science fiction novels – all representations of worlds that by definition do not exist –are nevertheless best understood as a more…