One of the interesting things about the Spirit of Prague, Ivan Klima tells us in this slim volume of essays, is that in a fundamental sense it no longer exists...

The cosmopolitan stew that nurtured it for centuries - the dynamic mix of Jews, Germans and other assorted Hapsburg subjects - was killed off by the genocides and purges of World War II. Whatever was left of Prague's once rich cultural and intellectual heritage further atrophied under Soviet rule.

The essays are book ended by a biographical sketch of his youth in the Terezin concentration camp and a critical essay on the work of Franz Kafka; the latter making a psychoanalytical, ahistorical case for understanding the art of K.

Along the way there is an interview with Philip Roth that gets feisty and brief meditations from the dark days of Normalization, some of which smack of the dull and second-rate theorizing associated with 70s dissident culture.

But however disparate the individual threads, the result is a tapestry which deepens our understanding of Prague, as well as of this erudite and profoundly ethical writer.