Book review: Prague Spring, by Simon Mawer

It’s 50 years since the Prague Spring, when it seemed that socialism could wear a human face. The dream was broken by the invasion of the “fraternal” armies of the Warsaw Pact, and Russian-controlled communism resumed its grip, not to be relaxed till the Soviet empire crumbled in 1989. Fifty years is long enough ago to make a novel set in Prague in 1968 historical, even though it is ten years short of the criterion for the Walter Scott Historical Novel Prize which Simon Mawer won two years ago with Tightrope. Reprehensibly and stupidly, his publishers mention that he has been shortlisted for the Man Booker, but not that he has won the Walter Scott.