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Books

Prague 22 by Raymond Tallis

Rick Lewis reviews Raymond Tallis’s latest book.

At this magazine we have a golden rule that we never publish a book review written by someone who is a friend of the author. Nor do we ever print book reviews if they are written by the publishers of those books. (Such reviews are called ‘press releases’). These are basic precautions to ensure impartiality and credibility. After deep consideration I will now proceed to break both of these rules, simultaneously. Just this one time.

Here goes the first rule: Professor Raymond Tallis has been a friend for nearly two decades and a columnist for Philosophy Now for over a decade. And oops, here goes the second rule: we at Philosophy Now are the actual publishers of his latest book, Prague 22. He has for many years been deeply enamoured of Prague, a city that is soaked with culture and full of surprises, much like Tallis himself. His many previous books have tended to deal exclusively with either medicine or philosophy. This new book is much harder to pigeonhole. It has elements of a travel book, elements of a cultural guide and strong strands of philosophical reflection. As it fell outside the remit covered by Ray’s usual publishers, he offered it to Philosophy Now to publish. We have never published a book before, but given Ray’s writing talent it seemed a good place to start. We hope to publish further Philosophy Now books in the future.

The plot is straightforward: Professor and Mrs Tallis board the No.22 tram, which runs past their flat in Prague. They rattle through many historic streets and squares of central Prague, alighting occasionally to meet a friend or visit some landmark, before finally reaching the vast Castle on its mount overlooking the river. The journey described in the book, Tallis admits, is a theoretical one, but it is a distillation of many actual journeys taken by Tallis on that tram on different days over a period of years. It’s a device that lets him talk about many of the city’s streets, squares and buildings, and the colourful characters who have built or occupied them down the centuries. This is fascinating in a cultural-guidebook kind of a way, and is as brilliantly and amusingly written as you would expect if you have been reading Ray’s ‘Tallis in Wonderland’ column. But gradually you realise that Tallis is up to something else, that his musings on these thinkers are steadily developing certain larger themes.

The main philosophical preoccupation of Tallis as he wanders these streets is the idea of the embodied spirit. It is an anti-Cartesian idea. Descartes thought that the human being consists of a physical body and a non-physical spirit or mind. Tallis, with his medical background, argues convincingly that the important fact is that we are embodied. Our minds may not be wholely physical but are affected in all sorts of profound ways by being housed within our physical bodies.

Tallis engagingly describes the twists and turns of religious struggles long ago, and the many ups and downs of the city’s past. He recounts some fairly tragic history, including the Defenestrations of Prague (over the centuries a statistically-unlikely number of its prominent citizens have perished in falls from high windows) and the terrible reign of the Nazi governor Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, who was assassinated in Prague by Czech parachutists in 1942. In 1938 Chamberlain tried to justify abandoning Czechoslovakia to its fate by calling it a far away country of “people of whom we know nothing”, but you’ll certainly already know some of the characters Tallis meets in his mind in these streets. The dramatis personae include Franz Kafka, Antonin Dvorak, Martin Luther, Ernst Mach the physicist, Jan Purkinje the physiologist, Dubcek, Havel, Jan Masaryk, and Jan Hus the religious reformer, but also countless actresses, bishops, writers, sculptors, scientists, saints and sages. The subtitle of the book is ‘A Philosopher Takes a Tram through a City’, yet so many of Prague’s thinkers and doers, heroes and villains, jump aboard Tallis’ train of thought that perhaps a better title would have been ‘A City Takes a Tram around a Philosopher’.

Rick Lewis is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Philosophy Now.

• Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram through a City, by Raymond Tallis. Philosophy Now Books, 2025, £9.99 pb, 352 pages. ISBN: 978-1399973816