Bohemia

Two books in one: you flip it over, and it becomes the other. A Winter in Zürau is about Franz Kafka’s stay in a small Bohemian village with his sister Ottla after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Or, as Gabriel Josipovici arrestingly puts it in the preface: ‘One day in the summer of 1917 the writer Franz Kafka woke up to find his mouth full of blood.’ (The echo of the opening line of Metamorphosis is surely deliberate.) Here, in isolation, he recuperated, or tried to. He wrote to Max Brod: ‘I’m not writing. What’s more, my will is not directed towards writing. If I could save myself… by digging holes,

Jaroslav Rudis’s latest novel follows the 99-year-old Wenzel Winterberg, a Sudetenland German, and his middle-aged Czech carer, Jan Kraus, on what is a quirky European take on the buddy road-trip story. Marx claimed that ‘men make their own history’, but do so under the burden of the past, with the weight of dead generations upon them. The tragedy soon to become a farce begins, according to Winterberg, at the site of the Battle of Königgrätz, with the old man proclaiming: ‘The Battle of Königgrätz runs through my heart.’ He then rambles on about its ‘half a million ghosts’, their roles and where they lie now, before blaming the battle for

Many girls dream about their favourite princesses. Elizabeth Stuart, a princess herself, took this fantasy a step further and modelled herself from childhood on her godmother and namesake, Elizabeth I. The young daughter of James I plucked her hairline to imitate her father’s predecessor, the great Tudor queen. Aged ten, she was painted with a vivid red wig, dripping in jewels recognisably inherited from her godmother. She even practised her signature until it was almost indistinguishable from Elizabeth I’s famous flourishes. At 13, grandeur got the better of her when she signed herself ‘Elizabeth R’, her most exact copy yet of the queen’s mark. The surviving document shows that someone