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flourish of the shoulders, she handed me a bilious-green
     glass tumbler three-quarters full of vodka
    We were in a small, neat, bright room with a lot of blond, fake-Scandinavian furniture. Everywhere, on every available flat
     surface, Marta's collection of Bohemian glass vied for space with the Professor's books. Through an archway there was a galley
     kitchen where saucepans were seething and steaming. J. and G. and I sat crowded hip to hip on a narrow sofa, our knees pressed
     against the edge of a low coffee table. The Professor sat opposite us in what was obviously 'his' chair, an old wooden rocker
     draped with a faded, tasselled rug; when he grew animated, or when Marta was provoking him with one of her tirades, he would
     propel himself back and forth with steadily increasing speed until, just when it seemed the madly rearing chair would tip
     him forward on to the floor, he would grasp the armrests and pitch himself stiffly back against the headrest and go suddenly
     still, queasily smiling, like Dr Strangelove in his wheelchair, pi nioned by a gravitational force all of his own. I made
     the first gaffe of the evening by asking how many rooms there were in the apartment. The Professor winced, and Marta in the
     galley turned from her steaming pots and gave a bitter snort of laughter; this room, it seemed, along with a tiny bathroom
     down the hall, was the extent of their living quarters. 'Our bed!' Marta said, pointing with a wooden spoon at the sofa where
     we were sitting. 'It unfolds,' the Professor corroborated helpfully, showing how with a graceful gesture of his hands. I am
     sure I was blushing.
    While Marta was noisily busy at the stove, the Professor conducted us on an imaginary tour through the city's museums we had
     been unable to visit in reality. His modestly delivered disquisition on Czech art in the twentieth century was a revelation,
     to me, anyway. Most of the artists he mentioned were ones, I am ashamed to say, that I had never heard of. The extraordinary
     flowering of Modernism in Prague in the years just before and after the First World War was put into the shade by brasher
     capitals such as Paris and Vienna. The long-lived exileKupka, who settled permanently in Paris in 1895, was one of the great figures of European abstraction. He derived many of
     his ideas from music - he liked to describe himself as a 'colour symphonist' - and photography, which he valued for its abstract
     possibilities. While Kupka was settling in Paris, the younger Prague painters were founding the Osma ('The Eight') group of
     avant-gar-dists, which in 1911 evolved into the Association of Plastic Arts, the cradle of Czech cubism. The greatest of the
     cubist artists was the sculptor Otto Gutfreund, although at the end of his career he abandoned the cube in favour of a kind
     of naive realism. The most tangible mark that cubism left on the city was in architecture. 8 As early as 1911 the architect Josef Chochol was putting up some remarkable buildings below the hill ofAfter the establishment of the Republic of Czechoslovakia at the end of hostilities in 1918 Prague became a sort of collection
     point for European avant-garde movements, particularly Surrealism, to which Praguers took with unsurprising enthusiasm. The
     city already had its own quasi-Dadaist movement, calledof which Charlie Chaplin was granted honorary membership in absentia. eventually imploded, but left a strong legacy in the Surrealist works of such artists as Josefand Jindf ich. . . Names, names. Listening to the Professor, I experienced a sense of shame such as a professional explorer would feel
     on being gently told that an entire civilisation had flourished briefly in the valley next to where he was born, the existence
     of which had been entirely unknown to him.
    Over dinner, crowded together at a small square table wedged into a corner of the apartment, we attempted to move from art
     to a discussion of the frosty state of East-West