Most of us know Martha Gellhorn as a war correspondent and Mrs. Ernest Hemingway, but she was a brilliant novelist as well. A Stricken Field is the story of an American woman in Prague in 1938 as the Nazis move in and hunt down opponents of the regime. If you are looking for models of resistance to brutality (I am), this is your book.

Frantisek Moravec was the Head of Czechoslovak Military Intelligence before and during the Second World War, when he was also my grandfather’s boss. When I found out that Morovec had written a memoir, after escaping from Czechoslovakia in 1948, I scoured the internet to find it. I really didn’t expect the book to be the masterpiece that it is. Moravec recounts with fine detail, how he and his team continually used their wits and guile to stay ahead of both the Nazis and the Communists and maintain Czechoslovakia’s existence, right up until the Iron Curtain eventually descended. In particular he recounts how he oversaw Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of the infamous Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, who had been the architect of the Final Solution. This is a book that really demands fresh attention.  

The Night of Wenceslas was the first thriller I read. I was in my teens, and into reading poetry at the time. My parents knew the author—we had even spent Boxing Day together—so Lionel Davidson was the first real novelist I met in person and I remember being excited to read this book.

The protagonist, Nicholas Whistler is young, half English and half Czechoslovakian. He hates working in his father’s business and is in debt because of his dissolute lifestyle. As a way out of his problems, he is lured into carrying out a mission in Prague and finds he has been duped into becoming an unwitting spy.

This book did not stop me from reading poetry—but spurred me to read much more widely.

Torch traces the evolution of a revolution.

In 1969, Czechoslovakia was being engulfed by the Soviet Union. Young people throughout the country were fighting to hold on to their freedom. Government crackdowns led to violence and despair. Choices were limited, and people became increasingly desperate.

Miller-Lachmann takes us to the heart of that time, and into the pain of young people watching their futures disappear. What I love about this book is the complex personalities of the teenagers at the heart of the story. You share their fears as they come to know more about themselves, their parents, and the terrifying world around them.

Their passions and resourcefulness are inspirational. It is a book about what is lost and gained as people fight the rise of authoritarianism. It is both a story from the past, and a cautionary tale.

Philip Kerr’s series of books about Berlin detective Bernie Gunther is a stunning achievement. The series weaves together the often disturbing history of the Third Reich, real-life characters such as Goebbels and Goering, and a sharp-minded and blunt-speaking detective everyman who is trying to survive the maelstrom around him with morals and life intact. Prague Fatale sets Gunther unto solve murders at a house party of high-ranking Nazis at Heydrich’s rural retreat. It’s a grim twist on cosy, country house murders.

I first read this book exactly 50 years ago, back in 1974, when I was 26. Ever since then, I have reread Jaroslav Hašek's masterpiece every single year, always in February. It is the gloomiest month of the year in Europe when our tonus is at its lowest, and we desperately need something to cheer us up.

The hilarious story of the good soldier is precisely that “injection” of optimism, serenity, élan vital that helps me make it through the last winter months till the arrival of the Spring. Although I already know by heart many passages from Svejk, I still laugh aloud while reading them—reading about the instinctive wisdom of an ordinary, small Czech man trying to comically outsmart the demonic forces of History…

Behind the Glass is an entire book about a building and the family that built it, lost it, and then reclaimed its heritage 60 years later. It is a complex nonfiction book written by an anthropologist, Michael Lambek, a grandchild of the couple that built the house in 1929. It is about the family, their friendship with famous philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Ernst Tuegend, but most of all, about the house.

If you are an avid supporter of cities, like I am, buildings are fascinating - for their history, their design, and, more recently, for their carbon reduction potential. The Villa Tugendhat, the glass house, was (and remains) a modernist masterpiece designed by Miles Van der Rowe in 1928. As an architect, Van der Rowe was incredibly influential in major cities globally - in my home city of Toronto, for example.

This book focuses on the philosophical reasons the… show more.

Because of the enormous odds stacked against each movement of this sort, the story of every nonviolent leader has an unlikely element to it. But Vaclav Havel’s biography may be the most unlikely of all. A playwright, an intellectual, and, in his own words, a “bundle of nerves,” Havel nevertheless found himself leader of Czechoslovakia’s astonishing nonviolent Velvet Revolution in 1989, and soon after became the country’s first president following the fall of communism. A very human embodiment of humanist conviction, Havel’s life is one to study.

There has never been (nor will there likely be) a runner like Emil Zatopek. His crowning achievement, a gold medal in the 5000m, 10000m, and the marathon in a single Olympics, has never been equaled, before or since. Yet the “greatest runner of all time” was more than just medals. Besides his Rocky Balboa-esque training regimen, Zapotek stood up to Soviet tanks during the Prague Spring. For this action, the runner was punished for years with a string of humiliating and strenuous jobs, before finally having his image rehabilitated in 1989. Known for his pithy quotes, the title of the book comes from a line he is said to have expressed to his fellow competitors before a race. 

Our experiences are quite different; Newmann grew up in Venezuela and didn’t know her father was Jewish, let alone that he’d survived the Holocaust. Yet, what drew me in was her desire to understand the pieces of her family story that were unexplained and the secrets that didn’t quite make sense.

Her quest to understand her father and his family, whom she never got to meet, kept me engaged until the end. We need to understand our past to understand ourselves.