I am a professor emeritus of history and sociology, who has taught in universities in Canada and the UK. In the 20th century, Prague Castle was the seat of a gamut of modern political regimes, from democracy through fascism to communism. Gazing across the river at the Castle one night during my first visit to the city in early 1990, soon after the fall of communism, it occurred to me that there can be few better vantage points from which to rethink "the modern condition." My interest in imaginative histories, which montage details rather than attempting to provide an overarching grand narrative, stems from wrestling with how to communicate this complexity.
I wrote
Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History
The exiled German critic Walter Benjamin committed suicide after he was detained on the Spanish border when fleeing from Nazi-occupied France in September 1940.
Published only in 1986 (and translated only in 1999), his Arcades Project explores the "dreamworlds" of 19th-century Paris, the "city of lights," through "the smallest and most precisely cut components"—"its arcades and its gateways, its cemeteries and bordellos, its railroad stations, and the more secret, more deeply embedded figures of the city: murders and rebellions, the bloody knots in the network of the streets, lairs of love, and conflagrations."
Benjamin's masterwork has profoundly influenced my books on Prague, which employ a similar technique of montaging fragments to illuminate the darker dreamworlds of the 20th century.
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them…
The filmmaker Humphrey Jennings was a leading British surrealist and a founder of the pioneering social research project Mass–Observation.
Built out of quotations from letters, diaries, literature, scientific journals, and official reports, Pandaemonium is his "imaginative history" of the industrial revolution in Britain. These "images," he writes, "contain in little a whole world—they are the knots in a great net of tangled time and space—the moments at which the situation of humanity is clear—even if only for the flash time of the photographer or the lighting."
Published long after Jennings's death, Pandaemonium formed the basis for Danny Boyle's spectacular opening ceremony at the 2012 London Olympic Games. Jennings's use of revelatory images has strongly influenced my own approach to writing history.
Collecting texts taken from letters, diaries, literature, scientific journals and reports, Pandaemonium gathers a beguiling narrative as it traces the development of the machine age in Britain.
Covering the years between 1660 and 1886, it offers a rich tapestry of human experience, from eyewitness reports of the Luddite Riots and the Peterloo Massacre to more intimate accounts of child labour, Utopian communities, the desecration of the natural world, ground-breaking scientific experiments, and the coming of the railways.
Humphrey Jennings, co-founder of the Mass Observation movement of the 1930s and acclaimed documentary film-maker, assembled an enthralling narrative of this key period…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
The Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano was by his own admission "a wretched history student," who set out "to rescue the kidnapped memory of all America, and especially of Latin America," from a "History [that] had stopped breathing: betrayed in academic texts, lied about in classrooms, drowned in dates, they had imprisoned her in museums and buried her, with floral wreaths, beneath statuary bronze and monumental marble."
In his Memory of Fire trilogy, Galeano resurrects the continent's real history in more than 1200 staccato images, built around quotations from colonial documents, contemporary press reports, and the like. These "fragments" come together in a "huge mosaic" to form a "voice of voices." This is exactly what I try to achieve in my own trilogy of books on the history of Prague.
Genesis , the first volume in Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy, is both a meditation on the clashes between the Old World and the New and, in the author's words, an attempt to rescue the kidnapped memory of all America." It is a fierce, impassioned, and kaleidoscopic historical experience that takes us from the creation myths of the Makiritare Indians of the Yucatan to Columbus's first, joyous moments in the New World to the English capture of New York.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, Annie Ernaux is one of France's best-loved writers.
She writes through details. Collaging phrases, photographs, lines of songs, objects, advertising jingles, fragments of film, radio and TV programs, and the words of men in bed at night, Ernaux writes the history of modern France via an intensely personal memoir. Dien Bien Phu, the Algerian War, the May '68 revolt, 9–11 are all here, as seen through her eyes and told in her unmistakable voice.
As one critic wrote, Ernaux "transforms her life into history and her memory into the collective memory of a generation." At once richly evocative and utterly unsentimental, this is one of the most original and impressive books I've read in a long while.
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre - the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times),…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
What holds together this freewheeling part-memoir, part-meditation, part-history, part-cultural study, wafting across five continents, is the bad, seductive smell of tobacco.
What it feels like to desire it, to inhale it, to crave it, to miss it. What smoking signifies. At sixteen it was Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless and Len Deighton's nameless spy in The Ipcress File who chain-smoked Gauloises blues.
At sixty it was the withdrawal I felt when I reluctantly "gave up" not just the risky kicks but parts of a past and a self too, accepting that I was getting too old to party. I love this book because I am a smoker who no longer smokes.
I love this book because I knew Lesley. But most of all, I love this book for Lesley's writing.
"The Smoking Book" is built on the foundation of two questions: how does it feel to smoke, and what does smoking mean? Lesley Stern muses on these questions through intersecting stories and essays. Stern writes of addictions and passionate attachments, of the body and bodily pleasure, of autobiography and cultural history. Smoking is Stern's seductive pretext, her way of entering unknown and mysterious regions. The book begins with accounts of growing up on a tobacco farm in colonial Rhodesia, reminiscences that permeate subsequent excursions into precolonial tobacco production and postcolonial life in Zimbabwe, as well as vignettes set in Australia,…
Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Munich Agreement destroyed Czechoslovakia’s artistically vibrant democracy, to 1989, when the communist regime collapsed in the Velvet Revolution.
This book weaves a vivid montage of the individual lives of poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists and entertainers, caught in up the crosscurrents of this turbulent half century. This is the territory of the ideologist, the collaborator, the informer, the apparatchik, the dissident, the outsider, the torturer, and the refugee—not to mention Václav Havel’s Prague greengrocer, the "little Czech guy" whose knowing complicity allows the show to go on. Over and over, Prague's modern history exposes modernity’s dreamworlds of progress as confections of kitsch.
