I decided to take a "busman's holiday" over the last few days and read or re-read some biographies of Austrian modernists. The first volume of Rainer Stach's biography of Franz Kafka came out this year, and I read around in it as soon as I received my copy. There I discovered, for example, that the German and Czech universities in Prague not only occupied the same building (while using separate entrances), but also shared the same library. Staircases were divided down the middle, one side for students at the German university, the other side for students at...