This is a collection of essays, charting five critical decades in the history of Czechoslovakia. Ivan Klima was a witness to the horrors of Nazi occupation, to the Stalinist regimes of the 1950s, the hopes of the Prague Spring in 1968, the resistance of Charter 77 and the triumph of the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Now, as his country faces further division in the 1990s, Klima invokes the spirit of Prague and the people that have shaped and sustained him throughout his writing career.