New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2022. This is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia's artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country's socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist dictatorship. In a brilliant narrative, Sayer weaves a vivid montage of the lives of individual Praguers - poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians - caught up in the crosscurrents of the turbulent half century following the Nazi invasion.