Book description
Playful and provocative, irreverent and inspiring, Capek is perhaps
the best-loved Czech writer of all time. Novelist and playwright,
famed for inventing the word 'robot' in his play RUR, Capek was a
vital part of the burgeoning artistic scene of Czechoslovakia of the
1920s and 30s. But it is in his journalism - his brief, sparky and
delightful columns - that Capek can be found at his most succinct,
direct and appealing. This selection of Capek's writing, translated
into English for the first time, contains his essential ideas. The
pieces are animated by his passion for the ordinary and the everyday -
from laundry to toothache, from cats to cleaning windows - his love of
language, his lyrical observations of the world and above all his
humanism, his belief in people. His letters to his wife Olga, also
published here, are extraordinarily moving and beautifully distinct
from his other writings. Uplifting, enjoyable and endlessly wise,
Believe in People is a collection to treasure.
John Carey is Emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford
University, a distinguished critic, reviewer and broadcaster, and the
author of several books, including studies of Donne, Dickens and
Thackeray, as well as The Intellectuals and the Masses. He is the
editor of Faber anthologies of Reportage, Utopias and Science. His
most recent book, What Good are the Arts?, was praised by Blake
Morrison as 'incisive and inspirational'.
