Glorious Prague by Charles Stevens

Both images of Prague by Yuri Shevchuk

Title: Glorious Prague 

Author: Charles Stevens 

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: The School at the Chalet by Elinor M Brent-Dyer

Margia and Amy Stevens are quite important characters in the Chalet School series. Margia is a highly talented pianist right from the start and her little sister Amy is the youngest pupil until the Robin arrives. We first meet them in Tyrol and follow their progress through the school, even keeping up with their lives to some extent after they have left and grown up. Amy even becomes one of the many characters to name a daughter after her charismatic headmistress, Madge Bettany (we don’t know if Amy was allowed to marry a doctor, which is of course the highest possible accolade awarded to Chalet School characters).

We also, to a lesser extent, follow Margia and Amy’s father. He’s a foreign correspondent for a London newspaper living in Bergen when we first meet him, and later he is posted to Cairo during WWII. Somewhere along the way he must have been in Czechoslovakia, and that’s how he came to write his masterpiece Glorious Prague. 

We are never given any details about the book. Is it a history or a travel guide? We don’t know. I have always imagined it to be in the same vein as James/Jan Morris’s wonderful Venice. And if you haven’t read that, I recommend you do.