Description

[T]he reader of this hypnotic, mazy "surrealist history" turns from its cascade of interlinking chapters quite caught up in words and their shadows, almost swept away.

Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century is clear about its genre and its genealogy. Sayer claims the mantle of Walter Benjamin, who had a penchant for building up a narrative from disparate fragments and from the yearnings and projections of the past. And so it is here. Prague is the stage set for a relentless examination of the hopes of modernism and their eclipse: the capital where irony and absurdity come to shape time's patterns ...

Sayer is a master of his sources: he looks back on a past still within reach, receding from us; he tracks down its threads, from liaison to liaison, from city to city. Can a research professor ever have written a book quite so triumphantly eccentric and persuaded a major academic press to publish it so splendidly?