The Coasts of Bohemia

In "The Winter's Tale", Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline - a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered in the margins of other people's stories. In this book, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a history of the Czech people that is also a history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy centre. Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theatre of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavonic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition. Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West and modernity from the va