Status Updates From The Coasts of Bohemia: A Cz...

"Although its creation was in part an artifact of Allied diplomacy, its animating ideas and its entire legitimacy derived from precisely such a claim. The difficulty was that the nation in question was - in practice - the Czech nation, and the cultural boundaries of this imagined community had come to be rather sharply drawn over the preceding century to exclude, in varying degrees, 49% of the population..."

"Seen from the outside, Czech history is little more than an incoherent series of lurching discontinuities."

"Of course, there is a specialized academic literature in English on Czech history and culture. But it is scarcely plentiful [...] and its impact is for the most part confined within the professional ghetto of 'Slavic Studies.' It is esoteric knowledge, walled away behind impenetrable languages and unfathomable cultures, like other Orientalisms."